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NOBODY CARED FOR KATE by Gene Thompson Random House; 266 pages; $13.95
For Kate Mulvaney and the six repulsive family members who are her guests, a deluxe barge trip through the South of France is no Love Boat excursion. First Kate, the unloved one of the title, meets with foul play; then two of her relatives are killed. The squabbling survivors are effectively imprisoned on the barge while the investigation begins to unfold, and suspicions dart from person to person like fireflies on the canal.
As it happens, Kate had sniffed danger and summoned from San Francisco a lawyer she kept on retainer for occasions like this. By the time Attorney Dade Cooley, an urbane 60-year-old, and his astute wife Ellen reach the Toulouse-Carcassonne canal, Kate has just surfaced, as dead as Ophelia, in a lock. In a classic, Christie-precise scenario, Cooley discovers that the murders almost certainly involve Kate's obsessive desire to own a priceless 35-carat ruby, a relic of the Crusades, which was stolen and has been missing for several years.
Cooley, as unflappable as his name suggests, takes over the investigation with flak and authority. He receives admirable support from the one-eyed Inspector Marbeau of Castelnaudary, a Cyclops properly impressed to find that the San Franciscan knows la belle France like the back of his land. Author Gene Thompson also knows French history, terrain, customs and cuisine, and has created a series of suspects who are only too plausible. By the punch line, one wishes they could all have been guilty.
THE MARRAKESH ONE-TWO by Richard Grenier Houghton Mifflin; 346 pages; $14.95
Even by the standards of Hollywood, the Third World and the CIA (and they all apply), Burt Nelson has real problems. Burt, who narrates this stingingly funny picaresque, is in Morocco to write the script of an Arab-backed movie biography of Muhammad, a "couscous Western," as the director calls it. Along the way, Burt becomes entangled with the producer's secretary-mistress, a Palestinian terrorist, and is kidnaped by Moroccan radicals who rashly expect his employers to pay $1 million in ransom. Burt, however, not only knows his "onions on Islam," he is a part-time spook and a full-time survivor who proves devilishly resourceful.
So does Author Richard Grenier, a sometime scriptwriter and now film critic for Commentary. Grenier's best scenes vividly mix farce and mayhem, but they remain set pieces. He is less concerned with tightening the strands of his narrative than with slashing away at the twin hypocrisies of Celluloid City and oil country. From Libya to Egypt to Iran his film makers go, struggling to shore up their collapsing finances, and everywhere they encounter nothing but fanaticism, ignorance, treachery and greed. Readers interested in a balanced view of the Arab world should look elsewhere. If life is not fair, in the words of a recent President none too esteemed by Grenier's narrator, satire is even less so.
THE BRAND-X ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY THE BRAND-X ANTHOLOGY OF FICTION Edited by William Zaranka Applewood; $11.95 each