Wild Easterns

By John Skow

Battling against the oily tides of history, the publishing industry has decided to exploit the Arabs. A certain amount of pluck is necessary. By next year, who knows? Arab interests may have bought into the American omni-corps that own so many publishing houses these days.

Eric Ambler has been charting the Middle East menace for years, sketching shabby cityscapes on the backs of greasy menu cards. The torpid and unheroic heroes of Ambler's books, however, scuttle wretchedly about, energized by greed and knowledge that their visas have expired. If repressive authority enters, it is in the person of an oxlike police corporal whose face bulges out of the top of a gray wool uniform that looks as if it had been boiled.

There is none of Ambler's brilliant seediness in the new breed of wild Eastern suspense books. Plots and characters of a dozen or more titles all derive from the same headlines -- during the fall of 1972 -- when Black September terrorists murdered 1 1 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Villainous Palestinians, flinty Israeli secret police and slightly less heroic American and English spooks never seem to lack technical expertise, first-class plane fare or a large supply of plastic explosives and Kalashnikovs (the Russian submachine guns favored by thriller writers).

The horrors planned by the fictional bad guys are no more grandiose than those that actually do occur. Yet some how, one of Ambler's losers, worrying about how to get through a grubby border station and about the things that will happen to him if he does not succeed, generates more uneasiness in the reader than any of the new terrorist melodramas. Is the problem that guerrilla theater is bad art, too charged with bombast to seem real, even when real people are dying? Like Western heads of state, thriller writers do not seem to know what to make -- money aside -- of the Arabs. In nearly all these books, Arabs tend to sound like parodies of Yasser Arafat delivering a hate broadcast.

They are also weak-minded and inept, thus easily foiled by the good guys, who are rarely American.

Black Sunday, a national bestseller by Thomas Harris (Putnam; $7.95), supposes an attempt to obliterate a Super Bowl football game (hurrah!) along with (alas!) both teams, the TV play-by-play and color men, beer vendors, pigeons, Pinkertons and some 100,000 spectators, including the President of the U.S. The sociopath who plans this provocation is not an Arab but a defecting American named Lander, who went sour while serving time as a P.O.W. in North Viet Nam. Now he pilots the advertising blimp that floats (aha!) above every important football contest. To get all the plastic explosive he needs, Lander applies to the Palestinians, an alarming people indeed: "Najeer ... wore a hood of shadow. His hands were in the light and they toyed with a black commando knife ... 'Do it, Dahlia. Kill as many as you can.' "

The Gary Cooper role goes to Major Kabakov of the Israeli Secret Service, a tough mensh who (unlike the book's CIA men) is in no danger of stepping on his own necktie. Kabakov's stalking of Dahlia and Lander is competently described, violent, technically interesting and utterly predictable.

A Clash of Hawks by Robert Charles (Pinnacle; $1.25) is memorable for its second sentence: "The 200-foot high derrick was a black, latticed steel phallus raping the hot, virginal blue sky."

Mockery in Arms by James Aldridge (Little, Brown; $7.95) is the only book of the lot that succeeds as a novel and not simply as a page turner. The author is fascinated by the wild, squabbling, Kurdish people of Iran, Iraq and Turkey, and their struggle for independence. A discovery of natural gas and oil in Kurdish territory seems a likely source of financing for the Kurds, but when they try to buy arms with the money officially paid for exploitation rights, the funds disappear into Europe's banking system. A Scottish paleontologist named MacGregor tries to help, and his investigation takes him to Paris at the time of the 1968 student rebellion. Textures are well observed: the roughness of Kurdish mountain men, the slithery politesse of European moneymen. There is a convincing smell of burnt insulation; it is clear that neither the French students' revolt nor that of the Kurds ever had the slightest chance of success.

Arafat Is Next by Lionel Black (Stein & Day; $7.95) would be a standard assassination entertainment, except that the target is a real political figure: the Palestine Liberation Organization chief. An element of bad taste seems to enter here, as well as bad literary judgment. The literary problem is that since Arafat is in fact not dead and the plot is not cast in the future, the reader knows that the assassination must fail. Frederick Forsyth managed to turn this liability into an asset in The Day of the Jackal. Black fails to do so, and the book's only suspense is in learning what form failure will take.

The Forty-First Thief by Edward A. Pollitz Jr. (Delacorte; $8.95) is a perfect book for someone stranded at an airport by a delayed flight. It is well enough written to hold boredom temporarily at bay but so trivial that if left behind at O'Hare Airport, one would be less disturbed than if one had misplaced a book of matches. The author's fancy here is that an eccentric inventor, working in secrecy at St.-Tropez, is on the point of perfecting a solar-powered car. The Arabs are out to stop him before he sells his process to General Motors, thus weaning the West away from its petroleum habit. When all seems lost, one of the bad Arabs reveals himself to be a good Arab, determined to make peace with Israel and save the GM third-quarter profits. Some of the figures in this fantasy--notably an ancient tyrant in French Intelligence--are worth a smile.

The Gargoyle Conspiracy by Marvin Albert (Doubleday; $7.95) assumes, perhaps wrongly, that the expunging of any American Secretary of State would be a staggering blow to Western civilization. The Palestinians who plan this misdeed lay their trap, rather self-indulgently, in the South of France. They are foiled, as they seem to be regularly in thrillers and less often in real life. The details are not especially interesting, but one bit of irony is worth mentioning. A terrorist, Selim, is found dead. Did he commit suicide to avoid capture? Certainly not, his English adversary concludes; no terror ist has ever been held for longer than eight months in a European jail. Why die when you can fly?

Operation Kuwait and Eleven Bullets for Mohammed by Harry Arvay (Bantam; $1.25 each) are the noisiest and most simple-minded of all the current Kalashnikov operas. The author is an Israeli billed as a ";former undercover agent." The cover of the Kuwait book, which is about an attack on a Black September training camp, exactly describes the product: "Timebomb excitement! Nonstop action! The crack Israeli Secret Service v. the International Sky Terrorists." These two wild Easterns are part of an Arvay series. At least three more such thunderations are threatened in fiscal '75.

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