Short Notices

END OF A MISSION by Heinrich Boll. 207 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

Postwar German fiction has its mea culpa school, its black-humor crowd and its how-did-it-happen-to-us hand wringers. Heinrich Boll (Billiards at Half-Past Nine) constitutes a school of his own. His writing skills seem at first oldfashioned, but they always turn out to be just right for hitting his targets: hypocrisy, his countrymen's haste to forget the Hitlerite period, the greed of the fat-cat crowd. In this short caper, set in today's Rhineland, a German army Jeep is burned by an intelligent young soldier with the active help of his equally intelligent father. The act is deliberate and they offer no defense at their trial. German courtroom justice, the army, the press and small-town morality are all lethally and satirically observed. The criminals come off well because even their apparently senseless act makes more sense than the system. Burning the Jeep is a Happening, a symbolic work of art. Their point, and Boll's, is plain: sane men are beginning to find their bureaucratic world intolerable.

UFOs-IDENTIFIED by Philip J. Klass. 290 pages. Random House. $6.95.

To most flying-saucer buffs, the frequent appearance of Unidentified Flying Objects near power lines is only natural; the UFOs, so the stories go, are either attempting to sabotage the power system or are merely recharging their batteries. To Author Klass, a former electrical engineer who is now an editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, there is a more logical answer: the power lines themselves may actually create UFOs in the form of coronas--clouds of glowing, ionized air that can form in intense electrical fields.

In this intelligently written and rational book (a rare phenomenon in UFO literature), Klass describes the scientific detective work that led him to decide on the probable cause of most previously unexplained UFO sightings. The enigmatic, incandescent objects, he concludes, are really a family of atmospheric phenomena that include not only coronas but ball lightning, St. Elmo's fire and "Foo Fighters," the same luminous globs that tailed World War II military aircraft. Klass seems resigned to the fact that it will take more than his well-documented evidence to shake dedicated saucer believers out of their state of UFOria.

THE THREE SUITORS by Richard Jones. 312 pages. Little, Brown. $6.

Lady Mignon Benson-Williams, septuagenarian centerpiece of this skillful social satire, is hard up for cash to keep the rural Welsh homestead from flaking away. Her best hope is to peddle the papers of her late husband, an exemplar of the Civil Service who not only recorded every crepitation in the corridors of power but also squirreled away correspondence from Churchill, Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald. But the market for such memorabilia seems to be glutted. Lady B-W has to put up with an editor for "Twentieth Century Documents" who is medievalist at heart, and a cocksure journalist for the Sunday supplements ("I get too much out of life to be an intellectual"). Eventually, she makes a proper connection with a spendthrift American college. Author Jones deals in quiet humor and subtle ironies; he can deflate an ego or nail a prig with the accuracy of a pub-darts champion. These qualities, in addition to his sure touch for sketching the terrain and its inhabitants, add up to what Lady B-W would call "a good read."

WHERE EAGLES DARE by Alistair MacLean. 312 pages. Doub/eday. $4.95.

This book is like a fun house full of terrifying voices, leering goblins, jets of hissing air--and no people. There are, to be sure, eight Allied agents who undertake the impossible mission of entering the Gestapo's Alpine headquarters to rescue a captured American general. They work out ingenious methods for scaling walls, confusing pursuers or silencing guards. But they never come to life. Friend and foe are mass-produced out of tiresomely familiar odds and ends: a homey old English pilot draws on an "evil-smelling briar" to the point of asphyxiation; a Nazi officer hatches sadistic schemes while sipping cognac; and a lovable American G.I., who is supposed to be wildly amusing, comes off about as funny as the gold drain. When the Gestapo headquarters explodes in flames, the G.I. observes lightheartedly, "I do hope that there's nobody using the toilet next door to where that bang went off." When the bangs go off in this book, the reader can only whimper.

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