CLASSIC CRIME
THE GUNMAN by Jean-Patrick Manchette
(Serpent’s Tail £7.99)
THE challenge of The Gunman is to keep tabs on the body count. The novel begins explosively with Martin Terrier, assassin for hire, disposing of his latest victim and, as a bonus to his clients, a girl who happens to get in the way.
But that’s it, decides Terrier. He has had enough of the killing game. His paymasters have other ideas. They want him for one last job and are prepared to go to any lengths to secure his services.
Manchette’s tight style and deadpan delivery have been compared with the best of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but while he undoubtedly modelled his fiction on the American masters of hard-boiled crime, we miss an underlying sense of honour or decency.
It is hard to warm to a character with seemingly no redeeming features whatsoever.
That said, 40 years after its first publication, Manchette’s sharp imagery has lost none of its capacity to shock. once started, the book is hard to put down.
ANTIDOTE TO VENOM by Freeman Wills Croft (British Library £8.99)
Known in the crime- writing business as an ‘inverted mystery’, the first half of the book explains how a conspiracy to murder came about, identifies the killers, reveals that death was by a snake bite — but leaves us ignorant as to how the poison was administered.
In the second half, we join forces with Inspector French who must first discover what we already know. As he challenges the apparently watertight alibis of the chief suspects, the urge is to mimic the pantomime cry: ‘Look behind you.’ But the inspector soon catches up so that we can all focus on how the deed was done.
It is no surprise that French beats us to it, but the tension is held until the last moment. The plotting is ingenious while the break from the traditional mystery format spikes our interest. Too long neglected, wills Croft deserves a place among the greats of the Golden Age.
THE MYSTERY OF TUNNEL 51
by Alexander Wilson (Allison and Busby £8.99)
PREPARE for a romping read. The mystery of the title is set in India in the days when the sun shone brightly over the British Empire.
Plans for the defence of the north- west frontier against Russian aggression have gone missing, their courier foully murdered. Sir Leonard wallace, head of British Intelligence, sets out from London to recover the dispatches.
It turns out that India is awash with spies and agitators intent on overthrowing the Raj.
Skipping lightly over the question as to why nobody had noticed this before wallace’s arrival, we can lean back to enjoy the cat-and-mouse chase across the sub- continent as our hero closes in on the mastermind behind a Bolshevist plot to stir up revolution.
This is the first of nine fast and furious adventures of wallace of the Secret Service.
with the sequels soon to be back in print, James Bond may find he has a worthy rival.