Amateurs

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Practically everyone thinks he has a novel within him, if only there were time to get it down on paper. Mercifully, most would-be authors never get beyond the stage of boring friends, acquaintances and airplane seatmates. Of those who do write, rather than just talking about it, few possess the tale teller's gift, the capacity to invent or recall events in a way that makes them seem significant to outsiders. Fewer still have the discipline to master a new craft. But four worthy current novels, all thrillers or mysteries, display just such painstaking effort by men better known for nonliterary achievements. They include an accountant, a Wall Street lawyer, a movie director and a Privy Councillor in Britain's House of Lords.

Perhaps the most laborious writing effort was undertaken by the accountant, J.R. Sprechman, whose first novel, Caribe, (Dutton; 280 pages; $17.95) took him decades. The result is anything but weary. The narrative has the sheen of quicksilver, and it manages to blend brutal scenes of New York City drug wars, hints of the supernatural reminiscent of a South American fable and political intrigue worthy of John le Carre. The scene is a haunted, Haiti-like island, and the four main characters are a blunt Manhattan policeman, a slippery arms dealer, a volatile Caribbean dictator whose paranoia is justified and an apparently immortal dwarf who serves the others as an all-knowing but helpless intermediary.

The complex plot offers interlocking instances of an eternal struggle between good and evil; in each case, the reader finds himself cunningly misled. Sprechman's theme, hinted rather than hammered at, is that life is a moral conundrum in which people are forced to make choices long before they can grasp the consequences. Despite some paranormal elements, Caribe does not read like a spiritual tract or a cheap shocker: the supernatural portions are elegant, almost metaphysical asides. Sprechman, 66, has worked in the movie industry for more than 25 years, as financial vice president of Joseph E. Levine's Embassy Pictures and, currently, chief financial officer of Kaleidoscope Films Inc., a leading Hollywood producer of movie trailers. The quality of Caribe indicates that he may well belong on the creative side of the business.

Haughton Murphy is the pseudonym of a fiftyish partner in a prestigious New York City law firm. The chief strength of his mystery Murder for Lunch (Simon & Schuster; 268 pages; $14.95) is its bemused glimpses of professional folkways. Murphy dryly observes how the size of the briefcase indicates an attorney's status: junior associates haul home thick wads of raw documents in bulky bags, while partners take away the distillate of that material: a few sheets in a thin leather envelope. He deftly sketches the ballets of protocol between august attorneys and rich parvenu clients, the ugly skirmishing between partners near retirement and their power-hungry successors, the condescension of smug lawyers toward everyone who works for them.

The mystery is a bit formulaic: after several people display powerful motives to kill him, an eminent attorney collapses of an apparent heart attack. A canny elder discovers that the death was murder by poison, then proves that the killing is linked to a point of law. The villain is dragged in from relative obscurity near the end, and the summing-up could be briefer. But the characters are portrayed with wickedly informed satire, and by the rueful conclusion, Murphy has exhibited more than enough potential to do for the legal world what the tongue-in-cheek Emma Lathen mysteries have done to demystify investment banking.

Bryan Forbes, 59, is something of a ringer among amateurs: he has written several other books, including an autobiography. But he is better known for a nearly 40-year film career as a scenarist (Seance on a Wet Afternoon), actor (The League of Gentlemen) and director (The Wrong Box). Unlike many writers who are savvy about movies, Forbes does not produce sketchy treatments, prepackaged for adaptation; each of his works is carefully and densely detailed.

Outwardly, The Endless Game (Random House; 309 pages; $17.95) is about a retired intelligence agent's lone, outlaw struggle to determine why someone murdered a prematurely senile woman who once was his colleague and lover. As in countless British espionage novels during the past few decades, the plot derives from the betrayal of Britain by Master Spy Kim Philby and his fellow moles for the Soviets. What distinguishes Forbes' book is his poignant linking of those defections to what he sees as his country's pervasive moral and material decay: "(He) wondered how anybody worth anything could continue to live in England. Every small town he drove through had the same faceless High Street: betting shops, uninviting pubs, takeaway Chinese restaurants, the pavements scarred with refuse spilling from plastic bags, as if the only growth industries left were those propagating ugliness and sloth. It seemed that the England he had once known had deliberately effaced itself."

Two Thyrdes (St. Martin's Press; 292 pages; $15.95) is about British moral rot of another sort, the ambition and reaction that caused a relative handful of mostly privileged young people to join fascist movements and endorse Hitler and the Nazis. Because such infiltration no longer threatens Britain's independence, the novel lacks The Endless Game's aura of larger significance. But it offers two ingeniously interwoven plots--twin attempts to discredit a father and son, 35 years apart. To understand what is happening to him, the son must solve a puzzle that baffled his father, who died in combat before his heir was born. Author Bertie Denham, 58, who has written one previous mystery (The Man Who Lost His Shadow), creates pungent characters and evokes subtle parallels between the superficially different Britains of father and son. The novel's special pleasure is its setting in the House of Lords, a political institution that has rarely been explored in modern fiction. Denham is in fact Lord Denham, a hereditary peer (one of his titles was created in 1660) and the Tory Whip. He writes with shrewd and skewering knowledge of the mores of his moss-bound haunts but loyally sees to it that Laborites come in for a full share of the attack.