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Eric Ambler has never Bonded a thriller or Spillaned a spy story. In 15 ingenious novels of suspense and intrigue, his protagonists—in Ambler land, there are few heroes—are almost invariably decent, intelligent, well-bred men more or less unwittingly enmeshed in Gorgonian webs of political and financial conspiracy. Such a man is Ernesto Castillo, a reserved, dedicated physician who works in a hospital on an island in the French Antilles.
Known to his colleagues as "Dr. Frigo" (frigo is French argot for refrigerator or frozen meat), the Paris-trained doctor and narrator of the novel is a native of a Central American state where his radical, politically potent father has been lately assassinated—some say martyred. By whom? All sorts of suspects come to mind—among them the military junta that has just taken over the country—but Son Ernesto does not really care. In the course of the novel, cast in the form of a month-long diary, he confesses that his father was no more than a calculating politician caught in the middle of banana-republic crossfire. What really concerns Dr. Frigo is his profession, as well as making good on a complete renunciation of his father's political movement, which unhappily regards Frigo as its eventual leader.
Ambler unfolds his plot in the painstaking fashion of a chess grand master. In urbane, ironic style, he traces the slow, circumstantial entrapment of Ernesto Castillo in a successful attempt by his father's old party to seize power in the Central American republic.
None of this is as exciting as, say, A Coffin for Dimitrios, The Light of Day (which became the movie Topkapi) or Journey into Fear. Yet Ambler's latest fiction is not just Nembutal for insomniacs but a novel densely composed and deftly delivered.
THE ABBESS OF CREWE by MURIEL SPARK 116 pages. Viking. $6.95.
Not wisely, perhaps, but very well, Muriel Spark has written a takeoff on Old What's-His-Name, the electronics expert. The author (Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) lives in Rome and is not American but English. Nevertheless, news of our strange presidential downfall has reached her, and she has responded with a strange, stinging parody.
The masque is set in England, in the Benedictine abbey of Crewe. The old abbess has died, and after bitter but surreptitious campaigning, tall, autocratic Sister Alexandra has beaten dainty, lovable Sister Felicity in the election to choose a successor. Sister (now Lady Abbess) Alexandra has used, or has caused to be used, or has been in on the planning of the use of, or at any rate certainly has participated in the cover-up of the use of, some highly modern techniques for keeping in touch with her opponent's activities. In fact, she has bugged the entire abbey, including the poplars, and has piped all the dirt back to a monitor hidden in a jeweled statuette of the Infant of Prague. But now Sister Felicity, who has been excommunicated for seeing a Jesuit lover, has peached to the press. The public is confused but delighted, the politicians are baying, and the Vatican is raising hell.