Thrillers And Crime
p. 103 · Read in the full issue
ADMIRERS of Eric Ambler’s tech nique in writing thrillers will be pleased with his new contribution to relaxation and entertainment.
The Light of Day is a classic of its kind, hilarious, fast-moving and unusual in conception. The story is told in the first-person by Arthur Adbel Simpson, son of a British Army Sgt.-Major and his Egyptian wife. Arthur claimed that he was British to the core, but the authorities failed to back it up with a passport. In fact, the whole theme of the story hinges on Arthur’s troubles over passports. When it opens he is living in Athens on a Greek permis de sejour, making a living as a tout, guide, chauffeur and journalist—in that order—while he fights a running battle over Egypt’s failure to renew his credentials.
Big trouble begins when he agrees to drive a car from Athens to Istanbul for a “customer” and the Turkish frontier police find not only that he is virtually stateless but that there are guns, ammunition and hand-grenades hidden in the car.
How Arthur ingloriously but effectively extricates himself from a gang of international crooks, pro vides all the tension and pace that the armchair connoisseur of ad venture requires.
Apart from being a first-class architect of thrillers, Ambler is a good writer. His situations are realist and at times earthy, yet he does not drag sex or violence into his novels merely for the sake of sex and violence. (THE LIGHT OP DAY. Heinemann. 22/6.) Age appears to be catching up with Erie Stanley Gardner, if his latest Perry Mason thriller. The Case of the Demure Defendant, is any guide. Gardner, in search of privacy, darts between four Californian homes, often dictates 10,000 words before breakfast, barks out his stories into a recording machine and employs seven full-time secretaries to put them on paper. But he ought to ease up. Demure Defendant is irritatingly padded with evidence that is both irrelevant and immaterial. Its plot hinges on the fact that a couple of bottles containing poison pills were driven miles to a lake and thrown in, yet never at any time is it explained why the murderer didn’t simply flush the pills down the drain. They might have been followed, we suggest, by the tape recording of this book.
(The Case Of The Demure
DEFENDANT. Heinemann. 16/-.)