Suspense

Suspense novels are meant to transport a man from his drab daily anxieties into a euphoric state of really high-class terror. Most authors in the suspense business used to accomplish this by piling up murder and mayhem, sin and skulduggery with all the subtlety of a meat-ax killer. That style is still widely practiced, but in recent years the suspense formula has become as elastic as a private eye's suspenders. It has often been stretched to include such weighty matters as character, group psychology, politics and sometimes even good writing. Thus a new category was created--well below the occasional Henry Jamesian thrillers turned out by such serious writers as Marghanita Laski (see below], but several steps above the Mickey Spillane gutter. A batch of new novels demonstrates the current suspense range from simple, old-fashioned sex fiends to complex, introverted drawing-room villains.

The Flaw in the Crystal by Godfrey Smith (Putnam; $3.50) is a brightly written, sprightly little tour de force that is all the more remarkable from a 23-year-old writing his first novel. It is about two young Englishmen involved in London high jinks and international low life. Graham Several, a financial wizard, is the crystal. Roger Meredith, a civil servant, is assigned by the Foreign Office to find the flaw. If there is no flaw in Several's loyalty, he is to be sent abroad on a vital secret mission. Meredith's search leads through the brilliant, overlapping aristocratic, political, literary and journalistic worlds of London to the discovery of a magnetic and completely seductive personality. It also leads to an ingenious surprise ending and the disclosure that the flaw of a many-faceted crystal sometimes lies in its hard perfection.

The Time of the Fire by Marc Brandel (Random House; $3) is a workmanlike portrait of a small American town and its mass hysteria under the terror of a homicidal maniac. The terror and hysteria rise to a high boil when the remains of local women are found neatly decapitated and expertly carved. Before the killer gets his comeuppance, the frigid daughter of one of the town's leading citizens thaws herself out, and town and townsmen are brought to naked life with considerable psychological insight.

Terror on Broadway by David Alexander (Random House; $2.75) is written in a language that bears a deceptive resemblance to English but is actually Broadwayese. In Novelist Alexander's hands, it is a blunt instrument that he uses to hammer out the unhappy saga of Waldo. Waldo is a psychopathic killer who gets a boyish kick out of playing ticktacktoe with a knife on the bodies of the ladies he dispatches. It is perfectly clear at the very beginning that Waldo is going to be caught by Hero Bart Hardin, editor of the Broadway Times, a journal devoted to horses and hoofers. On page eleven it is disclosed that Hardin's Broadway trademark is his collection of eleven gaudy vests, the latest being "a dove gray number with yellow tulips." Obviously, Waldo doesn't have a chance.

The Fugitive Eye by Charlotte Jay (Harper; $2.50) frankly tries to scare hell out of the reader and is fairly successful. Its hero, who is blind in one eye, sees the tail end of a murder in a forest near London. After he is temporarily blinded in the other eye by an accident, the murderers capture him, and the action gets under way as a dipsomaniac doctor prepares to pour acid in the hero's good eye. The chase in the dark has the reader identified with the hero all the way. Justice, as it must in such a tale, triumphs in the end.

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