Murder on the Cocaine Express

By Paul Gray

THE TRANSFER by Thomas Palmer; Ticknor& Fields; 402 pages; $14.95

Thrillers may borrow some tricks from detective stories and some atmosphere from spy fiction, but they are essentially different from both. Such works can trace their lineage directly back through the medieval romances to the classical epic and its archetypal plot: a hero risks his life trying to master overwhelming odds. Modern incarnations of this nonpareil (out of, say, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene or Robert Stone) have become increasingly antiheroic, their designs questionable and their morality ambiguous. But the trials they must endure, the plot of their quests, remain much the same, as formal and stylized as kabuki or an Elizabethan sonnet.

The Transfer shows that Thomas Palmer, in his first novel, knows all the right moves. He offers a hero with a preposterous scheme and, for the reader's benefit, a sidekick who must be told what is going on every step of the way. An innocent bystander, female, is caught up in the machinations. And the opposition forces are evil and apparently unbeatable.

Ray Hula, fat and fiftyish, owns a small marine salvage firm in Miami. Out of nowhere, he gets a phone call from his younger half brother, Michael Cruz. They have heretofore shared only a mother and mutual indifference (Hula's father was Polish, Cruz's a Portuguese seaman). Now Cruz, a New York mobster, needs Hula's help, offers him half a million dollars and threatens to destroy his business if he refuses. Hula does not. Cruz has somehow got hold of a ton of cocaine in Colombia and transported it to the Bahamas. A boat carrying this cache will approach Miami and run aground on a reef. Hula will be called by the port authorities, who trust him, to salvage the wreck and tow it in. The coke will be removed. Then Cruz will peddle it to the very gangsters from whom he stole it in the first place.

Once the cocaine is transferred to a van, Hula relaxes and tells Cruz: "So it's done. I'm glad it's over." Of course it is not done, either for Hula, Cruz, Wally Liberty (the pilot of the boat) or Hula's girlfriend Lisa Bishop. It is bad enough that Arthur Rawden, a canny investigator for the Drug Enforcement Agency, has picked up their scent. It is worse that a mysterious bald man continues to stalk Cruz, threatening to kill him and his associates. Worst of all, some of the ablest hired guns on the East Coast have converged on Miami, with orders to pay Cruz $10 million for the dope and then kill him, preferably over a long, long period of time.

It is impossible to watch this plot unfold without rooting for the underdog and then remembering that Cruz is as bad as his pursuers, a wildcat crook with delusions of grandeur. Palmer does not blink at Cruz's venomous ethics, but he sinks this character in a landscape of almost unrelieved corruption. He portrays a Miami and environs where the heat is always on: "The sun was a bludgeon hanging over the landscape, poised to smash whatever might attempt to set itself above the level, and nothing larger than a dragonfly dared to venture into its sight; not from lassitude but out of a strict fear."

Not only is the climate inimical, but the drug traffic has blasted apart the social order, enriching undesirables and demoralizing the forces of civic order. Rawden knows that he and his agents can achieve only hollow victories on the side of law and order: "There's so much stuff coming in that we could arrest just the grandmothers and do just as well." Even Cruz complains about what has happened to the neighborhood: "People used to come down here just to spend their money, but now they're not happy unless they go back with more. They see all this money and they think all they have to do is reach out and take it." With her world coming apart, Lisa protests to herself: "The things that were important in life had nothing to do with illegal drugs and large canvas sacks of cash." In this novel, hers is a minority report.

Author Palmer, 27, occasionally reveals his lack of experience. He does not always establish the point from which the action is to be viewed. It is unlikely, for example, that a passenger in a helicopter could perceive that a fence, far below, was strung at the top with concertina wire. Palmer also has a habit of interrupting characters' reveries and providing information that they do not know, a tic that needlessly diverts attention from the puppets to the puppeteer. But he successfully keeps a large cast of vivid actors breathlessly on the move. Better still, he offers an entertainment that is also a journey through the underworld and a harrowing of hell.

--By Paul Gray This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.