Fadeouts and Flagellation

THE SHADOWBOXER by Noel Behn. 31 7 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

By now, jaded readers of international spy fiction expect to get two books in one: a perversely complicated thriller and a perverted sado-sexual romp at least as inventive as the wares on the pornography shelf. The Shadowboxer is expertly fitted out to supply both.

As labyrinthine as the author's best-selling Kremlin Letter, it is set mostly in Central Europe late in World War II. The adversaries are a depraved lot of American military and a handful of German exiles--who all want to beat the Allies at setting up the postwar government in Germany--and an equally desiccated lot of Nazis whose aims seem less clear, but whose posturings and preoccupations are more exotic. There is, of course, a doomed agent who is the pawn of both groups. The days of John le Carre's simple, cigarette-smoking depressive are over, however. Our man is just down from the Alps, where he lived and worked with a knot of flagellant priests. He makes it to the end, snatching prisoners from concentration camps, but he has bad pains on the 8th, 17th and 26th of each month, the very days when his ecclesiastical friends used to get out the penitential thongs. To tell how he compensates for these twinges would give away a plot so complicated that the combined perceptions of Mme. Blavatsky and Krafft-Ebing are necessary to elucidate it.

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