RECENT THRILLERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 732, 24 July 1953, Page 14

RECENT THRILLERS

FORTUNE IS A WOMAN, by Winston Graham; Hodder and Stougl.ton. English price, 10/6. THE DUBLIN NIGHTMARE, by Philip Loraine; Hodder and Stoughton. -_ rice, 7/3. FOUR ROUNDUTS TO HEAVEN, by John Bingham; Veter Gollancz. English price, 9/6. AMBUSH FOR THE HUNTER. by F. L. Green; Michael Joseph. English price, 12/6. THE THREE INNS, by Ralph Inchbald; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 10/6. OUR of these five thrillers are outstanding, and the fifth is good on a lower grade. In Fortune is a Woman, | Winston Graham, a newish writer whose | Night Without Stars has been filmed, | shows that a thriller can be plausibly | constructed round acceptable cliaracters, and well written throughout. He is an exceptionally good story-teller. A young Englishman, unemployed and at odds with life, helps u strange woman on the road, finds his feet in the war, takes up insurance adjustment in London, meets the woman again in the course of business, and falls in love. Arson in her country house. with her semi-invalid husband dead ‘n the ruins, puts him in the double position of suspecting her and being suspected himself. The action is exciting and the dénouement tense. There are interesting glimpses into a line of business I have not met in fiction before. In The Dublin Nightmare one is taken into a much more violent world, one of Communist plotting and counterplotting, of murder and perilous pursuit. This, too, is a well-written story, and in contrast to books of the same kind laid in England ihe Irish characters and idiom have an exotic attraction. John Bingham, who made his name with My Name is Michael Sibley, has written a crime thriller in which there is no detection. In Four Roundabouts to Heaven, the whole advance and retreat process by which the main character, a man of ordinary humane impulses, comes to plan the murder of his wife, is laid bare to the reader, partly through the eyes of a close fiiend LL

who is in love with the woman the other covets. This is an ingenious study of a man who could kill but not hurt; at one point the plot turns on his avoidance of a cat on the road. Psychologically, it is an impressive tale, but the view of the corrupting power of evi' is rather horrifying. F. L. Green died recent!y, so Ambush for the Hunter may be his last book. It takes its title from the planting of a Communist woman spy in England in the guise of a much-publicised victim of Communism, with designs on the secrets of a young English research chemist. She is helped by an English civil servant who, lowever, has the grace to withdraw on the edge of the abyss. The means by which she is detected and thwarted, and the psychological elements involved in the struggle, are set forth in a highly exciting tale, the enjoyment of which is enhanced by the variety and vividness of the characters. To many, the most interesting feature will be the exposition of the motives that draw a certain type of intellectual to Communism. Ralph Inchbald’s second Coionel Paternoster novel presents such wellknown types as the tweedy, pipesmoking, cool-headed Englishman, the eccentric of both sexes, and the villainous foreigner. There is hectic and dirty work among present-day smugglers on the Cornish coast-caves and secret passages contraband. power-boats. and

beauty in distress.

A.

M.