Current & Various

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN by Ian Fleming. 183 pages. The New American Library. $4.50.

Even before the official publication date, the late Ian Fleming's final James Bond had jumped into ninth place on bestseller charts, with 80,000 copies already printed in hard cover. What the 80,000-plus readers will find in exchange for their money is a straight down-the-formula Bond book.

Fleming comes on with the usual unusual opening, which has nothing much to do with what follows. It just seems irresistible to have a brainwashed Bond attempt to execute M. This is 007's first understandable failure to complete an assignment. But after that, there is the reliable villain with the strange name, Scaramanga, a master assassin who uses only a golden gun, believes in sexual intercourse before every murder, and has "a third nipple two inches below his left breast." There is the girl. Since there have already been twelve books, and since he never beds with the same type twice, 007 has to fall back on his previously unattainable secretary, Mary Goodnight. It may have been just as well that Fleming died when everybody still thought he could do no wrong.

THE SCHATTEN AFFAIR by Frederic Morton. 309 pages. Atheneum. $5.

The scene is present-day Berlin. The hero is Leon Spey, an Austrian-American Jew who has become a professor of literature, and is now the highly paid front man for a U.S. hotel chain. Spey is supposed to organize an opening-day celebration for the hotel outfit's newest aluminum and glass waterhole. He needs the cooperation of the aged and mysterious Prince Schatten, who runs a crumbling resort hotel on the border of East Berlin. The prince is guarded by a sinister doctor and his coldly beautiful blonde daughter. That is the start, but after that Novelist Morton, author of the bestselling biography The Rothschilds, does none of the things a novelist is supposed to do. He shapes no story, evokes no emotion, tells no joke, makes no trenchant comment, follows no fascinating or even plausible character. His hero is a jackass even more boring than a professor-turned-pressagent might be expected to be.

SPRING TIDES by Samuel Eliot Morison. 80 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.

The salt has never lost its savor for Samuel Eliot Morison of Boston. As a boy, he mastered the literature of the sea from Aeschylus to Conrad. As a man, he became a famous historian of the sea (Admiral of the Ocean Sea, History of U.S. Naval Operations in World War II). Man and boy, he sailed "down north and up along" the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia summer after summer, and made voyages of opportunity in all quarters of the globe. Now, in a brief delightful memoir, the old salt recalls with affection some of the finest hours he has passed between wind and water --a day in 1961 when everything went right, a day in 1956 when everything went wrong, a long warm summer's sail among the shining isles of Greece. Much of his time is spent making crusty pronouncements from the poop ("A marina is the yachtsmen's slum"), and there is nothing here for people who think port is something that comes in a bottle. But anybody who can tell a top carling from a garboard strake will want a copy of Spring Tides in his dunnage the next time he does a windward dozen.

THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE 1453, by Steven Runciman. 256 pages. Cambridge University Press. $6.50.

It was the biggest cannon ever cast. The great barrel was 26 ft. long, and it fired a ball 3 1/2 ft. in diameter that weighed 1,200 Ibs. On April 12, 1453, it opened fire on Constantinople, capital city of the Byzantine Empire and the gateway to Christian Europe. At the rate of seven shots a day, the big gun battered at the enormous walls and their 7,000 Christian defenders while an army of 80,000 Turks waited. At dawn on May 29, the Sultan's janissaries stormed the shattered walls and took the city. The spectacular final siege and fall of Constantinople is here meticulously described by Britain's well-known medieval historian, in a volume that can be read as the coda of his massive History of the Crusades. Unfortunately, the other three-fourths of the book consists of relentlessly inclusive and superficial summaries of everything that happened in the known world for half a century before and after.

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