Current & Various

LOST EMPIRES by J. B. Priestley. 364 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

SIR MICHAEL & SIR GEORGE by J. B. Priestley. 244 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $4.95.

Britain's J. B. Priestley writes rather more than the average man talks. In the past 44 years he has published 37 plays, 29 volumes of nonfiction and 22 novels. His worst novels read as easy as a rug unrolls, and his best novels (Angel Pavement, The Good Companions) sound like Dickens updated and not too much marked down. Now 71, Priestley gives no evidence of deceleration--in recent months he has published two new novels in the U.S. Lost Empires is a warm, rowdy, old-fashioned tale about the vaudeville circuits in Britain half a century ago. Sir Michael & Sir George is a broad burlesque of bureaucrazy in Britain's welfare state. Both books provide the considerable Priestley public with no end of delightful antics by a delightful antique.

THE EGYPTOLOGISTS by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. 245 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) and Robert Conquest (onetime literary editor of The Spectator) were educated at Oxford, and both are sometime university dons. Between them, they have produced 18 books, including six novels and four volumes of poetry; in collaboration, they have edited the science-fiction "Spectrum" anthologies. Now they have attempted a comic novel. Like many others, this one assumes that there is surefire hilarity when British characters natter away with upper-class accents on low-class subjects. Not so. This story, about a group of lecherous London husbands who organize the scholarly sounding Metropolitan Egyptological Society as a cover for some amorous prowling, is about as funny as King Tut's tomb. And just as lively.

THE TWISTED THING by Mickey Spillane. 219 pages. Dutton. $3.95.

"You lousy slob!" says Dilwick the police chief. "Shut up, pig," says Mike Hammer--for him, an exquisitely genteel response. He has already extracted several of Dilwick's teeth with his knuckles, later subjects him to a fatal phlebotomy with a .38-cal. slug. The action in Mickey Spillane's 18th book is embossed with his usual delicate imagery ("The sun was thumbing its nose at the night"), characterization ("On some people skin is skin, but on her it was an invitation to dine"), and grammar ("You lay there, kid"; "I thought I could discern shouts"). As always, the forces of law, order and decency prove no match for Spillane's private eye, whose impatience with those virtues amounts to a crusade. The people who lay around reading Spillane books--50 million copies sold to date--must discern the same message.

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