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Powerful German forces near Calais could have been shifted to Normandy in time to throw the Allies back into the sea on D day. They were not, because the German command, on evidence provided by its own espionage agents, expected the imminent arrival of some 1 million U.S. and Canadian troops. This huge force, in fact, did not exist. It had been made to seem real by months of fake radio chatter, by inflatable rubber tanks and guns set out in fields to fool aerial reconnaissance, and by the eyewitness reports of German spies, all of whom were under Allied control.
This grand deception was the subject of Ken Follett's 1978 page turner, The Eye of the Needle, but it is given a fresh twist in Larry Collins' shrewdly detailed spy novel. His story presumes that British intelligence dropped agents into the Calais area to organize what would seem to be pre-invasion sabotage by the Resistance--and then betrayed its own heroes to the gestapo so that German generals would draw the obvious inference. Double and triple agents prowl through Collins' dark fiction, whose heroine is a heartbreakingly beautiful French-English operative named Catherine. All official papers about the intelligence office that would have conducted such an operation have in fact been destroyed or sequestered, so it seems unlikely that the questions raised by the author, of hideous treachery for the higher good, will ever be answered.
HARD MONEY
by Michael M. Thomas
Viking; 451 pages; $17.95
The pop novel of Big Business contains immutable ingredients: the perfunctory gray-flannel bodice ripping, for example, and the somewhat livelier frolicking in the greenmail by silicon-souled Harvard M.B.A.s. What this diverting work adds is an irreverent attitude toward high corporate boodlers, who are usually flattered by publicists and vaguely feared as large, distant predators by everyone else. To Author Thomas, a business journalist and former investment banker who seems to know his stuff, the financial sharks are so many Babbitts in $900 suits. Their laquered second wives are devoted to the sort of conspicuous lunching that, if really successful, is recorded in the columns. Their favorite politician, U.S. President Eldon Erwitt, beloved because his Eldonomics has made the world safe for greed, is an air-headed former TV announcer.
The considerable fun of the book is Thomas' deft and knowledgeable caricatures of these crass types. The plot involves the heroic efforts of a retired communications mogul to recapture his old television network, and to use it not only to rid the nation of the deplorable President Erwitt, but --here Thomas lapses into fantasy--to improve the quality of TV programming. This wistfulness becomes believable only at the end, when the uprising fails and mediocrity triumphs.
A CATSKILL EAGLE
by Robert B. Parker
Delacorte; 311 pages; $14.95