Damp Fireworks

By John Skow

TITLE: HONOR AMONG THIEVES

AUTHOR: JEFFREY ARCHER

PUBLISHER: HARPERCOLLINS; 386 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: When in the course of human events, inspiration fails, it's time for lunch.

Saddam Hussein, at least as he is caricatured in Western demonology, is the perfect comic-book villain for Jeffrey Archer's latest summer-weight thriller. ) What's more, the Iraqi strongman has cooked up a fiendish scheme to humiliate the Great Satan: steal the Declaration of Independence from its place in the U.S. National Archives, and burn it on July 4, 1993, in Baghdad's Victory Square. Horrors! Curses! Zounds!

Or words to that effect. Alas, brilliance ends with Saddam's bright idea. Even by the middling standards of pop novelists, Archer's prose is plodding and mechanical. Scenery creaks as the Washington set is wheeled out of the way and the Paris or Baghdad set is trundled in from the wings. Now and then a stagehand is visible. Characters speak lines (it seems to the reader) without force or emphasis, as if reading from scripts at a play's first run-through.

Scenes that are cleverly blocked out should work but don't. Here's the Declaration, John Adams' signature blurry from Saddam's spit, nailed to the wall at Baath headquarters in Baghdad. We see the hero, a lecturer in constitutional law from Yale, creeping in to switch the real document for a copy. Then the heroine, a beautiful Israeli spy who doesn't realize the switch has already been made, puts the original back in place and grabs the copy. Suddenly . . . but there's no tension, no believability, no sense that Baghdad's streets sound or feel or smell different from those of Paris or Geneva, or that a man and a woman in peril might react in different ways. This sort of frequent-flyer spy story depends on texture, and there's not much offered. Archer, who lacks the talent to get by with less than his best, writes like a man with his mind on an important lunch date.