Skuldruggery and High Technology

By Michael Demarest

This year's hardest currency may turn out to be the literature of dope, double-cross and revenge. The best of the current thrillers, many by little-known writers, reflect a move out from the cold war caper to a wider, well-plotted world of skuldruggery and high technology. The new books cover the map from Cozumel to Copenhagen, the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea. Their post-Bondian hardware ranges from a Guppy-class submarine to the world's biggest tanker, the Dragon M-47 antitank rocket to the Soviet Dragunov rifle. In most cases, the hero is motivated by the heroin, but there is no shortage of sex, usually exotic and always dangerous. Seven sizzlers:

THE SHIPKILLER

by Justin Scott; Dial/James Wade

341 pages; $9.95

Bursting out of a squall at 16 knots, a vast wall of steel pulverizes a small sailboat and steams blithely on. The million-ton megatanker Leviathan, biggest moving object on the face of the earth, leaves Peter and Carolyn Hardin floundering in the chill Atlantic. He survives; she does not. Dr. Hardin is ravaged by the death of his wife and half crazed over his inability to win redress or even acknowledgment of what he regards as murder. But he is rich, a skillful sailor and a brilliant technician. In another boat, a 38-ft. sloop he renames Carolyn, equipped with radar of his own invention and a purloined U.S. antitank TOW missile, Hardin sails off to stalk and destroy the black Moby Dick. Symbolically, his shipmate is also black, a physician, as was his wife, a young woman who had pulled him from an English beach and back to health, if not sanity.

The hunt takes them through a savage South Atlantic storm that dismasts the sloop and defuses the kill; even Leviathan barely survives the battering. Elegant Ajaratu Akanke, by now both sleeping and sailing mate, is spirited from Capetown to her native Nigeria while Hardin lays a solo course for the Persian Gulf, where Leviathan will take on a million tons of oil...

New Yorker Justin Scott spent two years researching and writing The Ship-killer. It shows. His saga of the battered, unyielding Carolyn is as heady as Francis Chichester's narrative, with a draught of Melville and a slosh of Josh Slocum. His choice of villain is a shrewd one. Leviathan is even more dangerous and ungovernable than any vessel described in Noel Mostert's Supership. Scott, who has published five previous novels, limns his driven people as stylishly as his boats. As for Peter Hardin, he will surely name his next sloop Ajaratu.

THE JUDAS GOAT

by Robert B. Parker

Houghton Mifflin; 181 pages; $7.95

Spenser, as readers know from Robert Parker's four other novels about the man, is a flip, middleaged, not too successful private investigator from Boston. He has style though and, rarer yet, compassion and a moral code. Asked by a Massachusetts millionaire to track down the gang of crazies who killed his wife and daughters with a bomb in a London restaurant, Spenser replies: "I don't do assassinations." But he does do bounty hunts. The price: $2,500 a head, plus expenses, for the capture, dead or alive, of the nine terrorists involved. Spenser's marks are members of the so-called Liberty group, an anti-Communist outfit dedicated to preserving white rule in Africa.

The pursuit starts in London, where Spenser's enterprise is not viewed with unalloyed joy by Scotland Yard. After a couple of sanguinary melees, he is joined by Hawk, a smooth, totally amoral black man and sometime adversary of Spenser's (Promised Land) with a taste for fancy duds, birds of all stripes and Taittinger champagne. (Spenser quaffs Amstel beer.) The chase leads to Copenhagen and Amsterdam and on to a tingling denouement at the Olympic Games in Montreal. Parker, who has described himself as "a reformed academic," knows his cityscapes. He also has a wry wit and an attentive ear for dialogue. Indeed, the sayings of Badass Hawk constantly upstage Spenser. Told of the Liberty leader's plan to save the Dark Continent for the white man. Hawk drawls: "He got a big job. I hear there's quite some number of Nigras in Africa."

TECHNICIANS OF DEATH by Tony Williamson; Atheneum 246 pages; $8.95

The technicians of the title are versed in every form of extirpation, but mostly the kind of death that goes with, for or by heroin. A Palestinian terrorist group sets out to finance its operations by taking over distribution of all the stuff from Southeast Asia's poppied Golden Triangle. Which is fine with the Bangkok-based tycoon who controls the trade, Chung Li, known as the Scorpion. Chung has decided that Thailand is no longer safe for an honest pusher; he seeks another line of work. "I wish." he says in the novel's opening sentence, "to purchase a country." The acquisition--Kuwait?--may be possible, if not peaceable, with the $10 billion cash value of the dream dust Chung can assemble.

At this point, the FBI, the Israeli intelligence service and other concerned agencies get wind of the great horse trade. They decide to divert the dope by sending in Lee Corey, a versatile (The Doomsday Contract) G-man, impersonating Terrorist Leader Carlos Ramirez Sanchez, a.k.a. the Jackal. Scorpion and pseudo Jackal go off to collect 9 1/2 metric tons of crude opium. British Author Tony Williamson's account of their buying trip into the Triangle--stalked by the real Ramirez--is wild, high adventure. It is topped by the American's solution of the shipping problem. With some Bangkok bullyboys and a few qualified if reluctant technicians led by a former U.S. Navy commander turned junkie, he pirates a submarine that had been abandoned by the Americans in South Viet Nam, torpedoes a pursuing gunboat, loads the sub with the H and, after a horripilant transpacific odyssey, attempts a rendezvous with the U.S. Coast Guard. Throughout, Agent Corey finds time for good food, wine and silken Thais. He deserves to surface elsewhere.

A STENCH OF POPPIES

by Ivor Drummond; St. Martin's Press 192 pages; $7.95

These opium poppies grow in Turkey. They are not your ordinary Papaver somniferum, but a new strain developed over eleven years by a Soviet scientist from Armenia. Infuriated by his government's decision to end the better-poppy-for-socialism program (his aim was to produce a more potent drug for medical use), Dr. Krikor Grotrian makes a deal to sell the seeds to an Armenian dealer, who smuggles them into Turkey. There, largely because they bear scarlet blooms rather than the more common white petals of opium flowers, they flourish undetected in the hinterland. What Grotrian does not realize is that heroin from his little flowers causes instant, hideous death. In England alone, more than 500 addicts are wiped out by the new-strain Turkish dope.

Enter the jolly trio of Sandro, a rich, glossy Italian count; Jenny, a golden-haired English aristocrat; and Colly, a wisecracking American who enjoys one of his nation's largest inherited fortunes. Relaxing in Istanbul, they stumble across the huge drug operation run by Mustafa Algan Bey, ostensibly Turkey's premier dealer in precious carpets. Their adventures take them in and out of jail cells, dungeons, buses, trucks and steamers and across the length and breadth of Poppyland. About the only peril they do not indulge in is erotica. However, Scotsman Ivor Drummond's dippy novel could also serve as a tourist's guide to Turkey. Caveat from Jenny re Istanbul; "Too many dead cats and too many live cockroaches."

THE STIFF UPPER LIP by Peter Israel; Crowell 187 pages; $8.95

Hashish, according to a character in The Stiff Upper Lip, "is the biggest growth product in France." A runner-up might be basketball, le basket, which the French have discovered with delight and ineptitude. As Private Detective B.F. (for Benjamin Franklin) Cage soon finds out in his third adventure sponsored by Peter Israel, the two trades can be slimily and bloodily involved.

The American detective represents a rich, impatient New York client who is paying a lot of money to locate his vanished, overfed son, believed to be in Paris. Cage and the City of Light are getting along fine until he gets involved in the misfortunes of a 6-ft. 7-in. black basketball star, Roscoe Hadley, known as "Adlay" to his Gallic worshipers. Cage winds up representing Adlay without fee against sundry real and imagined threats on his life from Paris to Amsterdam and some mob intervention from California. Nonmonetary compensation comes from a sexy Anglo-Parisienne who outsmarts just about everyone; la belle Valerie may even cure Cage of his addiction to Air France stewardesses.

Author Israel, a Manhattan publishing executive who lived for four years in Paris, writes intimately and amusingly about France, its people and institutions. Where else would you learn that the national anti-narc bureau is called the Central Office for the Repression of the Illicit Traffic of Stupefiers?

THE DEATH FREAK

by John Luckless, alias Clifford Irving and Herbert Burkholz; Summit 250 pages; $8. 95

As the author of that authentic fake, the "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, prolific Writer Clifford Irving can be relied upon for verisimilitude. Here Irving teams with entertaining Novelist Herbert Burkholz (Mulligan's Seed) to write a suavely persuasive, anti-Establishment thriller with the bitter aftertaste of Campari and vodka.

The antiheroes of The Death Freak are old foes and sudden bedfellows: Italian American Eddie Mancuso of the CIA's Technical Services Division and Muscovite Vasily Borgneff, his KGB counterpart. Each is his country's genius of UKDs (Unusual Killing Devices); each, independently, has decided to retire from the killing game. Both are then marked for "extraction" by their agencies (they know too much). To survive, the assassins must knock off the five top section bosses of their respective outfits in Colonial Williamsburg and rustic Zhukovka. The odd couple--Dirty Eddie and cosmopolitan Vasily--get to pool their talents through a seductive Washington connection named Chalice, whom they also share.

So successful is their counteroffensive that when the score reaches 6-0 for Eddie-Vasily, their former employers are also compelled to join forces. Only then do the CIA-KGB apparatchiks realize that the deadly duo have switched roles: Eddie has taken on the Soviets, while Vasily is vacuuming the Washington spooks. Neither elite can predict how, when or against whom the hunted pair will deploy a lethal list of weapons that include camera-fired flechettes, boomslang venom, plastique-packed tea bags, flame-throwing hair dryers, nerve gas and atomic tennis balls. Nor can they figure who or what is the ubiquitous Chalice, or whether the Mancneff partnership can hold up. As for the Irvholz team, its novel is clever, cynical and compelling.

COCAINE AND BLUE EYES by Fred Zackel; Coward McCann & Geoghegan; 264 pages; $8.95

Drugs and thugs, a missing person and a backchatting investigator also dominate Cocaine and Blue Eyes. Fred Zackel's sprightly first novel, set mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area, combines the story of a Pacific Heights dynasty, corporate shenanigans, Chinatown gangs, a spectrum of sex, aging flower children, Mafia money and the houseboat life in Sausalito. The result is as nerve-rattling as a full-throttle auto chase from Grant Avenue to Fisherman's Wharf.

At the outset a sleazy young dope dealer vainly attempts to hire Investigator Michael Brennen to locate blue-eyed Dani, his missing girlfriend and meal ticket. Brennen has just about decided to retire from the shamus game. However, when the dealer shows up mysteriously dead, the down-at-heels p.i. takes on the posthumous assignment. Dani, it develops, belongs to a wealthy Faulknerian family held together by booze, barbiturates, bitterness, incest and greed. Brennen finally finds the girl (also mysteriously dead) and discovers that the family business is being run by a homosexual Chinatown lawyer and his epicene "nephew." The nephew is quietly siphoning off cash to finance a cocaine-smuggling operation, and the tale moves to a bewildering but believable showdown. His publisher reports that Sausalito-based Zackel is working on a second novel, which on the evidence should be as welcome as San Francisco's cracked-crab season.

--Michael Demarest

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