Books in Brief

The Yellow Room, by George Shipway (Doubleday, 278 pp., $5.95). The dock leader who has brought England to near collapse is blown up, a black power leader falls under a subway train; the autopsy shows he had been shot. A leading industrialist with licit and illicit ties behind the Curtain dies in a fox-hunting accident; a BBC broadcaster has his head blown off in a pheasant drive; three student radical leaders—Communists all—die in an unexplained auto accident. Does England have its Brazil-type death squads, the press asks? Scene shifts. We’re in the Yellow Room of the Chilian Club, a slowly decaying London club for retired army officers—most of them cavalrymen—and General Sir Henry Mornay has just commented regretfully to Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Mayne-Amaury that they’ll have to forget about that red MP. Something’s come up. It’s the PM. He’s about to sell Britain’s new superweapon to the Russians. And the four elderly army officers with nothing to lose but their lives and everything to gain for their country and who have voluntarily re-enlisted in Her Majesty’s Service (Her Majesty all unknowing) prepare to add the Prime Minister of Great Britain to their extermination list. It’s the Kind Hearts and Coronets of spy stories, handled with that special British understatement that makes the ensuing derring-do all the more titillating as the quartet of distinguished white-haired gentlemen in dark suits, bowlers and rolled umbrellas do the rascals in. When it’s over we leave them in the Yellow Room, glasses in hand gazing drowsily into the fire. “A candle pops and gutters. The clock ticks restfully. Cinders settle in the grate. Mornay says dreamily, ‘A pity we never got that red MP. I wonder. . . This reader hopes.

P. L. BUCKLEY

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The Yellow Room, by George Shipway (Doubleday, 278 pp., $5.95). The dock leader who has brought England to near collapse is blown up, a black power leader falls under a subway train; the autopsy shows he had been shot. A leading industrialist with licit and illicit ties behind the Curtain dies in a fox-hunting accident; a BBC broadcaster has his head blown off in a pheasant drive; three student radical leaders—Communists all—die in an unexplained auto accident. Does England have its Brazil-type death squads, the press asks? Scene shifts. We’re in the Yellow Room of the Chilian Club, a slowly decaying London club for retired army officers—most of them cavalrymen—and General Sir Henry Mornay has just commented regretfully to Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Mayne-Amaury that they’ll have to forget about that red MP. Something’s come up. It’s the PM. He’s about to sell Britain’s new superweapon to the Russians. And the four elderly army officers with nothing to lose but their lives and everything to gain for their country and who have voluntarily re-enlisted in Her Majesty’s Service (Her Majesty all unknowing) prepare to add the Prime Minister of Great Britain to their extermination list. It’s the Kind Hearts and Coronets of spy stories, handled with that special British understatement that makes the ensuing derring-do all the more titillating as the quartet of distinguished white-haired gentlemen in dark suits, bowlers and rolled umbrellas do the rascals in. When it’s over we leave them in the Yellow Room, glasses in hand gazing drowsily into the fire. “A candle pops and gutters. The clock ticks restfully. Cinders settle in the grate. Mornay says dreamily, ‘A pity we never got that red MP. I wonder. . . This reader hopes.

P. L. BUCKLEY