Robbins' Egg

THE ADVENTURERS by Harold Robbins, 781 pages, Trident. $5.95.

While Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers) was writing The Adventurers, Leon Shimkin, his publisher, took a peek at a half-finished page and asked what happened next. "I don't know," replied Robbins. "The damned typewriter broke. I'm waiting for a guy to fix it." Fixing the typewriter was Robbins' second mistake; the first was writing the book.

The Adventurers' international-jet-set subjects would confound a Zola. In the hands of Robbins they become like the projections of CinemaScope: highly colored, nine times larger than life, and relentlessly two-dimensional. One of the projections is Diogenes ("Dax") Xenos, diplomat, soldier, businessman, patriot, politician, international satyr and unintentional satire. Dax is to women what Dash is to washing machines: he makes them feel ten feet tall. His sometime pals, a French playboy and a White Russian con man, are not far behind in their technique: one of them receives a gold cigarette case from a female admirer inscribed delicately: 'To the world's greatest swordsman from his most grateful scabbard."

Cliches in Clutches. To keep the customers interested, Robbins has tried every trick in his carpetbags, which means almost every bizarre sexual practice--plus once in a while a little kissing. Take all that away and the reader is left with an utterly baffling story about pseudopolitical intrigues in a Latin American republic where the peasants are revolting and their leaders disgusting. In the end, the book sinks of its own weight (2 Ibs. 2 oz.) and its excesses: four-letter words that are stuck everywhere like flies on flypaper and cliches that lie in clutches on practically every page ("El presidente's face went white with anger . . . 'I have had men shot for saying less!' "). Readers who like to spot the fictional distortions of real-life people in Robbins' books (Howard Hughes and Jean Harlow in The Carpetbaggers) will have no trouble identifying lightly veiled counterparts of the Rothschilds, Trujillo, Swindler Serge Rubinstein, and Porfirio Rubirosa.

While The Adventurers is Robbins' biggest egg, it is nevertheless a solid-gold one. Advance printing reached 175,000 copies, and even before it was written Producer Joe Levine, who bankrolled The Carpetbaggers, took a million-dollar option on it, plans to put it before the cameras before it cools off. With such success enveloping him, Robbins feels that he can afford to snipe genially at some fellow writers who have enjoyed loftier reputations. Norman Mailer, he says, lost his knack "because he ran into his belly." And as for Truman Capote: "He'd be all right if he took his finger out of his mouth."

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