PLOTS AND HAZARDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 666, 10 April 1952, Page 14

PLOTS AND HAZARDS

JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV, by Eric Ambler; Hodder and Stoughton. English price, 10/6. MR. BLESSINGTON’S PLOT, by John Sherwood; Hodder and Stoughton. Engish price, 9/6. NOW OR NEVER, by Manning Coles; Hodder and Stoughton: English price, 9/6. A ROUGH SHOOT, by Geoffrey Household; Michael Joseph. English price, 8/6. THE RED TASSEL, by Pg Dodge; Michael Joseph. English price, T is instructive to compare the first three of these thrillers. The John Sherwood and Eric Ambler are concerned with plot and counter-plot in satellite States behind the Iron Curtain; the Manning Coles with a Nazi plot in Germany. Sherwood and Coles tell of secret service, and though Eric Ambler’s Englishman goes to a Communist country to report a treason trial objectively, he gets drawn into conspiracy. The difference is in approach and treatment. There is an element of humour and even gaiety in Now or Never (not the best Manning Coles, but that is not a condemnation), and Mr. Blessington’s Plot. Tommy Hambledon’s unofficial London assistants are in good comic form. Mr. Blessington, outwardly the conventional English civil servant complete with umbrella, but most effective with hand and brain when trouble comes, is a foil to the closely packed hazards of the story. In each story is a love romance. Eric Ambler includes no such reliefs in his picture of Communist terror. There is no romance, no extraneous humour, no suggestion that contact with evil may be a lark. For this reason his book is much the most telling of the three, The Dorset man who is caught up in a coil of trouble because, while out _ --ee__

shooting, he accidentally kills a supposed black-market poacher, may be a descendant of the fugitive in The Thirtynine Steps. His flight from the gang he has flushed is about as hectic as anything of the kind; the reader may get lost in the maze. A Rough Shoot is a competently written story, with an authentic flavour of the countryside, but despite the warning "It cannot happen here," I suggest that, as a subject, fascist plotting in England is being overdone. The Red Tassel took me to my high est altitude (geographical) in fiction17,000 feet at a Bolivian mine. It is agreeable travelling in entirely new country with a _ beautiful and lively American woman who is to see her property for the first time, and a knowledgeable stranger she has engaged at La Paz as detective and adviser. There is attempted murder on the way, and strange happenings at the mine, but I found the local conditions-the landscape, the effects of the atmosphere, the transport llamas, the Indians, and the Catholic priest, at least as interesting

as the plot.

A.

M.