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Duncan Kyle writes thinking man's thrillers (The Suvarov Adventure, Whiteout!) that invariably become bestsellers in Britain, and for good reason: they combine all too human characters, masterly plotting and impeccable research. Black Camelot is all Kyle guile. The novel is set in the waning months of World War II, when the Third Reich's slimier survivors are engaged in a last-ditch struggle.
The Nazis' scheme is to smuggle to the Soviets lists of Britons who have supported the German war effort. Their hope is to inflame Stalin's deep distrust of his allies. The plan goes agley when the documents, hand-carried to Sweden, are used instead to blackmail English industrialists.
Kyle's antihero is 35-year-old Hauptsturmführer Franz Rasch, a much decorated Waffen SS commando. Assigned to deliver the lists in Stockholm, he is betrayed by his bosses. His trail leads to neutral Ireland and England and finally back to Germany. There the disillusioned Rasch attempts to capture vital files from Schloss Wewelsburg, the Black Camelot that Himmler assembled as a Teutonic perversion of King Arthur's court. In one of the best siege narratives since The Guns of Navarone, Rasch and other embittered SS men infiltrate the monstrous castle at the same time that it is being destroyed on Himmler's orders.
Happy endings are not the Kyle style. But time is a great provider. Today, the author informs us, the castle has been reconstructed as a youth hostel. Such truths are comforting; but it is fiction like Black Camelot that makes history live.
SECRET ISAAC by Jerome Charyn Arbor House; 315 pages; $9.95
Jerome Charyn exerts energies that could make a turbine envious. At 41 he has published his twelfth novel, an adrenal tour of Manhattan, Dublin and parts unknown. The title character is a grief-racked, unshaven drifter who caroms around in search of trouble. The quest is professional: Isaac Sidel is first deputy police commissioner, a plainclothesman eaten by dreams and ravaged by a tape worm fastened to his entrails.
Deep in middle age, Isaac has suddenly acquired the wisdom of a sage and the passions of a schoolboy. In his rag picker's guise he becomes smitten with Annie Powell, a beautiful hooker disfigured by a D-shaped scar carved in her cheek.
The scarlet letter was placed there by her crooked Irish lover, Dermott Bride. Isaac's tale of jealousy and vengeance is a simple one, diverted by the author's irrepressible gusto: in New York, a woman's eyes turn "a green that was so fierce, Isaac had to grab the wall." In Ireland, the sky is so dark, "the elves must have put a roof on Cashel Hill." Shouts of murderers and comedians sound across the Hudson and Liffey rivers. Episodes in Nighttown and the underworld consciously echo the rhythms of James Joyce and Saul Bellow, but Charyn manages to sustain his own peculiar tone, a unique amalgam of psychological insight and scatological farce. It is one of the most unlikely and compeling literary combinations since T.S. Eliot's Gerontion mixed garlic and sapphires in the mud.
FIELDS OF FIRE by James Webb Prentice Hall; 344 pages; $9.95