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∙It's a Free Country, disguised as a thriller, is a fable that might have been concocted by an unusually simple-minded fellow traveler. The villain of the piece is the British security system, which is apparently feeble enough to let a Burgess and Maclean, a Philby or Vassall, go undetected for years, but is eager to winkle out a man of the people of leftist leanings who just happens to handle sensitive hardware. He is a noble, rugged, beer-drinking type who had fought against Hitler and Franco, and his consort is a very nice schoolteacher married to someone else. The jilted husband sets Security on the coup!e. It is a setup calculated to have the bleachers cheering as the pro-Communist pair outwit the villainous security men. The proletarian hero investigates the investigators and exposes his three persecutors as 1) the husband of a convicted shoplifter and father of a reefer-drag ging beatnik son, 2) a collector of fancy ceramics specializing in Victorian toilet bowls, and 3) a queer.
∙The Statesman's Game is a glum and pretentious fantasy written in humorless prose about Rupert Royce, a British shipping tycoon who has fallen in love with the Soviet Union and shows signs of a second love affair with Red China.
It is the sequel to another Aldridge novel, A Captive in the Land, about the same enlightened multimillionaire who had been made Hero of the Soviet Union after dragging a paralyzed Russian explorer to safety over an incredible distance of polar ice. Has he been brainwashed? The sinister Admiral Lille, chief of naval intelligence, seems to think so, and the reader may well decide, despite Aldridge, that the old sea dog is right. There is a great deal of top-level muckraking about the malevolent moral dwarfs who operate international finance-capitalism; it is possibly the least convincing stuff since Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd went crusading for a better world amid the corrupt chancelleries of Europe.
The fastest-selling new spy thriller in the U.S., already on the bestseller lists, is The Kremlin Letter, by Noel Behn (284 pages; Simon & Schuster; $4.95). It raises no serious questions at all, except perhaps about taste. Faced with the espionage writer's inevitable decision of choosing between Ian Fleming's rollicking escapism and John le Carre's gritty realism, Author Behn, a onetime off-Broadway producer who served for two years in the U.S. Army's counter-intelligence corps, cops out. The result is a pop horror comic about a mission to Moscow by a team of freelance operatives: a sadistic rapist, a dehumanized naval officer, a pimp, a homosexual, and a beautiful young girl who is not only an electronics genius but can tie knots in a string with her toes. The best thing about the book is that readers get a slight sporting chance. After Chapter 4, they are offered a choice of breaking a paper seal and going on, or returning the book with the seal unbroken and getting their money back. Cop out.