Books: Greene Grow the Authors

THE TEMPTER (225 pp.) — Anthony Bloomfield—Scribner ($3.95).

Graham Greene discovered in Brighton Rock (1938) that a thriller's format and a dose of Krafft-Ebing can lure usually unreflective readers into a brush with the profound issues of guilt and redemption. To a steady procession of writers—all of them willing to be thought deep—the formula has seemed good enough to copy. The latest imitator, and one of the ablest, is Anthony Bloomfield, novelist and BBC scriptwriter. His imitation is not slavish, since his weighing-up produces rather different totals than the master's. But setting, characters, mood and action are all attentively derivative.

Corruption & Cure....

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