(5 of 5)
BREAKHEART PASS by ALISTAIR MACLEAN 178 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.
Here it is again—that sinister, faintly claustrophobic ship of fools venturing on wintry wastes, those corpses that start mysteriously appearing, the urbane and ruthless government agent who is everything that E. Howard Hunt once hoped to be. This time, though, Alistair MacLean operates, not from some place like Bear Island or Ice Station Zebra, but in the American West (circa 1875).
What we have is a troop train carrying relief and medical supplies to a snowy Nevada cavalry fort supposedly afflicted by an outbreak of cholera. As the train chugs onward through the mountains, bodies proliferate like Ten Little Indians, telegraph wires go dead, troop cars are uncoupled and plunge spectacularly into ravines. As always in MacLean, alarming quantities of wine and whisky are consumed.
Never mind that it often seems a parody of Zane Grey. MacLean's tale gleefully highballs along at a brisk, cinematic clip. Funny touches are provided by the English understatements of MacLean's Pinkerton-man hero. He is the sort of chap who, on examining an arrow embedded in the heroine's shoulder, might mutter, "Mmmm, Apache, I shouldn't wonder."
A CRY OF ANGELS by JEFF FIELDS 383 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.
This first novel works the boundary between the Old and the New South, keeping a steady, contemptuous eye on the treachery of progress.
Earl, a raggedy 14-year-old orphan, lives in his great-aunt's tumble-down boardinghouse in the black section of Quarrytown, Ga. It is, in effect, a nursing home; the boarders are all geriatrics cases. Earl's best friends are Em Jo-john, a giant, anarchic Indian who works occasionally as handyman, and Tio, a black grocery clerk with the practical native genius of Ben Franklin.
All that may sound icky and derivative. But ten or 20 pages along, the author seizes the reader with a Southern gift for storytelling and never lets go. Fields relates how Jayell Crooms marries the snotty "brass cracker" Gwen from Atlanta, how the sinister Doc Bobo, Georgia's answer to Papa Doc Duvalier, proceeds toward his doom. Rich and full of color, character and moral drama, A Cry of Angels is an authentic cry of American innocence uttered just as the bulldozers knock down Tom Sawyer's whitewashed picket fence.