Real and Fantasy Roles

The ingenious Paul E. Erdman writes suspense novels in which power politics and high finance play major roles. These novels are highly vulnerable to the march of events, being set in the near future. However, as with a Hitchcock film, for example, disbelief is suspended, and the fact that the fate of the late Shah of Iran was not exactly what happened in The Crash of ’79 is tolerated while the suspension lasts.

Mr. Erdman wrote The Last Days of America in 1980, but set it in 1985. His postulates are close enough to the concerns of this column to qualify for a few reflections here. In the novel, the Reagan Administration has come and gone in a single term, having proved incapable of undoing the damage done by its predecessor, not merely to the United States’ image of credibility but to the substance of true strategic power. In the German Federal Republic, Franz Josef Strauss, the 1980 loser in the election stakes, is in power as chancellor, much as the 1960 loser Richard Nixon made it to the White House in 1968.

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Brian Crozier

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The ingenious Paul E. Erdman writes suspense novels in which power politics and high finance play major roles. These novels are highly vulnerable to the march of events, being set in the near future. However, as with a Hitchcock film, for example, disbelief is suspended, and the fact that the fate of the late Shah of Iran was not exactly what happened in The Crash of ’79 is tolerated while the suspension lasts.

Mr. Erdman wrote The Last Days of America in 1980, but set it in 1985. His postulates are close enough to the concerns of this column to qualify for a few reflections here. In the novel, the Reagan Administration has come and gone in a single term, having proved incapable of undoing the damage done by its predecessor, not merely to the United States’ image of credibility but to the substance of true strategic power. In the German Federal Republic, Franz Josef Strauss, the 1980 loser in the election stakes, is in power as chancellor, much as the 1960 loser Richard Nixon made it to the White House in 1968.