THE RUSSIAN INTERPRETER by Michael Frayn. 222 pages. Viking. $4.50.
Moscow is an off-the-beaten-track locale for cold war suspense novels, possibly because few Western authors can fight through the Red tape to gather local color. Michael Frayn won entree by studying as an exchange student at Moscow University. As a result, his sprightly book shines with an eerily realistic glow.
The narrator, oddly enough, is a young Englishman named Manning who is working on his thesis at Moscow University. He is hired as an interpreter by a countryman, Gordon Proctor-Gould, who bears a striking resemblance to Greville Wynne, the British salesman who in...
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