Practically everyone thinks he has a novel within him, if only there were time to get it down on paper. Mercifully, most would-be authors never get beyond the stage of boring friends, acquaintances and airplane seatmates. Of those who do write, rather than just talking about it, few possess the tale teller's gift, the capacity to invent or recall events in a way that makes them seem significant to outsiders. Fewer still have the discipline to master a new craft. But four worthy current novels, all thrillers or mysteries, display just such painstaking effort by men better known for nonliterary achievements. They include an accountant, a Wall Street lawyer, a movie director and a Privy Councillor in Britain's House of Lords.
Perhaps the most laborious writing effort was undertaken by the accountant, J.R. Sprechman, whose first novel, Caribe, (Dutton; 280 pages; $17.95) took him decades. The result is anything but weary. The narrative has the sheen of quicksilver, and it manages to blend brutal scenes of New York City drug wars, hints of the supernatural reminiscent of a South American fable and political intrigue worthy of John le Carre. The scene is a haunted, Haiti-like island, and the four main characters are a blunt Manhattan policeman, a slippery arms dealer, a volatile Caribbean dictator whose paranoia is justified and an apparently immortal dwarf who serves the others as an all-knowing but helpless intermediary.
The complex plot offers interlocking instances of an eternal struggle between good and evil; in each case, the reader finds himself cunningly misled. Sprechman's theme, hinted rather than hammered at, is that life is a moral conundrum in which people are forced to make choices long before they can grasp the consequences. Despite some paranormal elements, Caribe does not read like a spiritual tract or a cheap shocker: the supernatural portions are elegant, almost metaphysical asides. Sprechman, 66, has worked in the movie industry for more than 25 years, as financial vice president of Joseph E. Levine's Embassy Pictures and, currently, chief financial officer of Kaleidoscope Films Inc., a leading Hollywood producer of movie trailers. The quality of Caribe indicates that he may well belong on the creative side of the business.
Haughton Murphy is the pseudonym of a fiftyish partner in a prestigious New York City law firm. The chief strength of his mystery Murder for Lunch (Simon & Schuster; 268 pages; $14.95) is its bemused glimpses of professional folkways. Murphy dryly observes how the size of the briefcase indicates an attorney's status: junior associates haul home thick wads of raw documents in bulky bags, while partners take away the distillate of that material: a few sheets in a thin leather envelope. He deftly sketches the ballets of protocol between august attorneys and rich parvenu clients, the ugly skirmishing between partners near retirement and their power-hungry successors, the condescension of smug lawyers toward everyone who works for them.