Books in Brief

The Man in the Mirror, by Frederick Ayer Jr. (Regnery, $4.50). The giant Russian IBM in MGB headquarters in Moscow purrs gently and drops a dozen cards into the basket. Soviet Intelligence officers look them over and discard nine. Three are handed to two men—a plastic surgeon and a portrait painter. They compare them with several blown-up photographs. Karl Friedrich von Tetlow, exColonel of the SS, genocide, is chosen and whoof, we’re off again: it’s E. Phillips Oppenheimer’s The Great Impersonation brought up to date, and just as much fun. Von Tetlow, who escaped to the Argentine after the War, is kidnaped and given the choice of working for the Russians or being turned over to Israel. The man he is to impersonate, Roger Lowell Storrow, Back Bay Boston, Groton, Harvard, Special Assistant to the President of the United States on Security Matters is, in turn, kidnaped while on an amateur archaeological vacation in Mexico. His wife’s devoted maid is framed as a jewel thief and goes to jail; his wife is killed in a hit-and-run accident; Storrow’s dependable middle-aged secretary is labeled hysterical when she reports to the police that a strapping Negro broke into her apartment one night, stripped her naked—but didn’t assault her or even rob her. On a remote Mexican hacienda von Tetlow watches his alter ego day and night through a one-way window. When all is ready he returns to Washington: he has suffered an accident while exploring the Mayan ruins and arrives, his face bandaged to cover plastic surgery, his right arm in a splint (Storrow was a par golfer), his right hand shattered (the easier to explain a shaky signature). No wife, no maid, an undependable secretary. Will he get away with it? Will the real Storrow escape in time to warn U.S. authorities? The wind-up is fast and satisfying.

P. L. BUCKLEY

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The Man in the Mirror, by Frederick Ayer Jr. (Regnery, $4.50). The giant Russian IBM in MGB headquarters in Moscow purrs gently and drops a dozen cards into the basket. Soviet Intelligence officers look them over and discard nine. Three are handed to two men—a plastic surgeon and a portrait painter. They compare them with several blown-up photographs. Karl Friedrich von Tetlow, exColonel of the SS, genocide, is chosen and whoof, we’re off again: it’s E. Phillips Oppenheimer’s The Great Impersonation brought up to date, and just as much fun. Von Tetlow, who escaped to the Argentine after the War, is kidnaped and given the choice of working for the Russians or being turned over to Israel. The man he is to impersonate, Roger Lowell Storrow, Back Bay Boston, Groton, Harvard, Special Assistant to the President of the United States on Security Matters is, in turn, kidnaped while on an amateur archaeological vacation in Mexico. His wife’s devoted maid is framed as a jewel thief and goes to jail; his wife is killed in a hit-and-run accident; Storrow’s dependable middle-aged secretary is labeled hysterical when she reports to the police that a strapping Negro broke into her apartment one night, stripped her naked—but didn’t assault her or even rob her. On a remote Mexican hacienda von Tetlow watches his alter ego day and night through a one-way window. When all is ready he returns to Washington: he has suffered an accident while exploring the Mayan ruins and arrives, his face bandaged to cover plastic surgery, his right arm in a splint (Storrow was a par golfer), his right hand shattered (the easier to explain a shaky signature). No wife, no maid, an undependable secretary. Will he get away with it? Will the real Storrow escape in time to warn U.S. authorities? The wind-up is fast and satisfying.

P. L. BUCKLEY