Capital Gains

By Paul Gray

THE SIEGE OF THE VILLA LIPP

by ERIC AMBLER 275 pages. Random House. $8.95.

After 40 years, Novelist Eric Ambler, 68, has traded in the cloak and dagger for a trust fund and pocket calculator. Ambler's 15 earlier tales of espionage and intrigue created a shadow world of border crossings and doublecrosses that was both distinctly his own and widely (and successfully) imitated. Such younger writers as John Le Carre and Len Deighton are firmly in the Ambler tradition. The Siege of the Villa Lipp tries a new route. The most imaginative shady deals, it says, are no longer concocted by world-weary agents and conniving government bureaucrats but by jet-hopping financiers. Ambler's latest hero is the guy who came in with the gold.

Paul Firman pulls a string of European companies offering tax-haven advice for the wealthy. To hear Firman tell it, his setup "is an organization concerned with tax avoidance by strictly legal means." A Dutch criminologist named Professor Frits Krom had once glimpsed Firman in a different guise, as an agent in an extortion and embezzlement ring.

Fiscal Crimes. Ambler sets these two adversaries down in a Mediterranean villa and proceeds to complicate an already tangled web. Firman's task is to feed Krom a diet of "truth, rubbish and half-truth" that will leave his interrogator totally befuddled and, most important, hide the identity of Firman's boss: Mat Williamson, a Fiji-born financial wizard who can be terminally mean when his interests are threatened. While Firman tries to bamboozle the professor and his two academic assistants, Williamson decides to hasten things by killing everyone involved.

In allowing Firman to tell his own story, Ambler produces the same moral blur that characterized his earlier spy novels. Because Firman is indeed under siege, from several directions, it is hard not to root for him. An avowed liar who frequently protests his own innocence, Firman also deserves all the trouble he gets. If nothing else, he is guilty of rampant pettifogging.

Not even Ambler's skills can make fiscal crimes committed via telex or computer as gripping as older forms of skulduggery. Still, The Siege of the Villa Lipp has more than enough cerebral twists and sophisticated wit to offset its comparative bloodlessness. And Ambler includes sufficient shocks to show that he has not forgotten how to put his horrors before his cartel .

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