Spies & Eyes

The two prevailing trends in espionage-crime literature today go in opposite directions. One heads toward the pure escapism of Fleming flimflam, the other never comes in from the cold of procedural realism. The current best of the two worlds:

THE FRENCH DOLL by Vincent McConnor. 250 pages. Hill & Wang. $3.95. In this one the agent works for the U.S.'s Central Intelligence Agency. He starts off impersonating an American pilot who has been dead some 20 years but who sold an important flight chart to the Nazis in the last days of World War II. Bullets and bodies start falling around him the minute he assumes the disguise. This book is in the older tradition of shoot first and don't ask questions afterward because what is one life anyhow. But it also provides a kind of Paris-by-night tour--through the sewers, over the roofs, and into transvestite dens. For some Parisian reason, all the bad guy's spies are chestnut vendors. Another nice Gallic touch: as the heroine is about to be chained to the wall and whipped by a neo-Nazi sadist, she takes time out to lament that she missed her lunch.

THE INTERROGATORS by Allan Prior. 319 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.50. Although this is basically a procedural, step-by-step police-hunt story of the usual British high caliber, the author tried to give it a literary quality with a lot of red brick class feeling and the private problems of a pair of tippling Midlands detectives. The result is a pretty good novel, but not for those who like their detection without social conscience.

MIDNIGHT PLUS ONE by Gavin Lyall. 249 pages. Scribner. $4.50. Lewis Cane, hero of this adventure yarn, is a former British agent who ran guns for the French Resistance during World War II. After 15 years of private-eying, he finds himself back on the Continent convoying a fugitive millionaire industrialist from Brittany to Liechtenstein. In the course of dodging everyone from police to the hired killers who are after the industrialist, Cane retraces his old Resistance route through the Auvergne, encountering wartime friends and enemies and fighting several pitched battles along the way. British Author Lyall, one of the better new Bondmen, fills his book with fine local color and crafty foreign agentry. But he also supplies the necessary ingredient of the newer brand of spy stories: brooding about the morality of shooting down one's enemies in peacetime and the terrible problems of being top gun.

CUNNING AS A FOX by Kyle Hunt. 209 pages. Macmillan. $3.95. British Crimewriter John Creasey is a one-man Book-of-the-Month Club. Since 1931, under his own name and a dozen pseudonyms of wonderful ordinariness,* he has managed to write nearly 500 books. To his long list of heroes--Gideon of the Yard, The Toff, Handsome West--Creasey here adds his first new one in ten years. He is Dr. Emmanuel ("Manny") Cellini, psychiatrist first, detective second, who in this adventure is rung in to help not the bobbies but the criminal's neurotic parents. For them and for the reader, Cellini has an almost revolutionary message: some people are not spoiled by their environment or their families--they are just plain no good.

*Gordon Ashe, Norman Deane, Robert Cain Frazer, Michael Halliday, Kyle Hunt, Peter Manton, J. J. Marric, Richard Martin, Anthony Morton, Ken Ranger, William K. Reilly, Tex Riley and Jeremy York.

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