Current & Various

THE BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN by Len Deighton. 312 pages. Pufnam. $4.95.

Len Deighton's spy stories are superior matriculants in the Fleming school, and can be swallowed like Chinese food. They give great pleasure while being consumed, but in an hour or two the consumer is hungry again. No one, probably not even Deighton, can follow a Deighton plot. Like its forerunners, The Ipcress File and the bestselling Funeral in Berlin, this one winds along a serpentine of intrigue that defies both credibility and comprehension. It involves an anonymous secret agent, a fetching and murderous Finnish girl, a linear computer that can call people on the telephone, and a clutch of hen's eggs inoculated with a deadly virus.

THE FIREDRAKE by Cecelia Holland. 243 pages. Afheneum. $5.

The usual historical novel is notoriously long on panoply and pomp. In this spare but sturdy tale, young (22) First-Novelist Cecelia Holland cuts away the familiar embroideries and tells the story of a wandering warrior-knight who rights for pay in the feudal feuds of llth century Europe, winds up under William the Conqueror in the thick of the slaughter at Hastings. Author Holland, who writes history as if her hero were watching it happen, en-capsules the medieval military mind: brash as plunder, elemental as blood.

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