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Robert Ludlum is an ex-actor whose first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance, owes a large debt to histrionic melodrama. Its action encompasses the two World Wars. Its central figure—heir to the immense Scarlatti industrial fortune—is Ulster Scarlatti, a thoroughly bad seed who may be depraved but is certainly not deprived. Active duty as a younger scion in the U.S. Army during World War I infects him with a fondness for fascism. After the war, under the gullible noses of the family's financial advisers, he transfers huge sums of money to Europe. Then, poof! . . . he disappears, to reappear in Zurich as surgically deformed Heinrich Kroeger, intimate of the German high command, the center of an international backer's dozen of tycoons who are underwriting Hitler. U.S. intelligence, with help from his abandoned wife and widowed mother, pursues Scarlatti through the capitals of the world, encountering murder, madness and megalomania among the high and the mighty. The plot is pure kitsch, but does occasionally clutch, and the reader rests assured that the damned indeed are doomed.
WIZARD OF THE UPPER AMAZON by Manuel Córdova-Rios and F. Bruce Lamb. 203 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.
As a youth at the turn of the century, Manuel Córdova-Rios left Iquitos, Peru, to accompany a gang of rubber harvesters on a brief trip into the Upper Amazon. He returned home seven years later. In between, he lived in the jungle with the primitive Amahuaca Indians, first as a captive, finally as chief. Nine years ago, F. Bruce Lamb, a U.S. researcher in tropical flora, first met Córdova-Rios, then transcribed and translated the old man's astonishingly detailed, fascinating recollections.
With the Indians' help, Córdova-Rios quickly learned to move soundlessly through the underbrush, alert to the forest's early-warning system: the cries of startled birds, the fetid scent of the deadly fer-de-lance, the click-click of an enraged wild boar. Xumu, the old chief of the Amahuaca, also instructed him in jungle medicine. The stem of the paka nixpo plant, when chewed, prevented tooth decay for years; the extract of the ayahuasca vine was especially prized for producing visions that, Córdova-Rios says, actually enhance human intelligence. After many adventures—hunting, harvesting rubber, procuring arms for the tribe—Córdova-Rios eventually tired of the Indians' pettiness and "musky odor." He escaped to civilization, where he became renowned as a great healer.
Manuel Córdova-Rios is a simple man. He draws no moral from his experience; his descriptions of jungle cures and tribal society are tantalizing rather than complete. Still, he is a superb storyteller. His rich, supple prose re-creates the darkness of the rain forest—its dangers, omens and teeming, insistent life.
NOBODY KNEW THEY WERE THERE by Evan Hunter. 249 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.
The time: 1974, ". . . a decade before 1984." The protagonist seems to be just another middle-aged paid assassin. His contract is with three university professors. The plot: to blow up the Peace Train scheduled to pass through a university town two weeks hence, carrying "the man," along with the usual entourage of Government brass, Secret Service men and reporters.