Serpent in Uniform

CONSPIRATOR (184 pp.) -- Humphrey Slater -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

This speedy, thrilling novel begins with a courtship so disarmingly warm and sunny that no reader will dream of the horrors that are lying in wait.

Major Desmond Ferneaux-Lightfoot, D.S.O., of His Majesty's .Brigade of Guards, fascinated Harriet because his character was so mixed. Snootily correct in his brilliant uniform, free-&-easy in old country clothes, Desmond's "animal eyes" made him a scary lover, but he had a wonderfully gentle way with children. To hear him in church, intoning the responses in a pious voice, was enough to convince you that he was a sanctimonious prig--until you saw him gay & dashing in a nightclub. The trusted confidant of his general, Desmond was one of the most promising officers in the army. When he asked her to marry him, in a clumsy, boyish way, Harriet's heart was touched; she gladly accepted.

Curious Wife. Their married life was typical of the officer set--dinners with the colonel, shooting-parties, receptions and balls at the best London houses. But Desmond never let social splendor spoil his sense of kindness. He paid constant visits to a crippled veteran who had been his batman in World War II. He spoke tenderly of a doting old aunt, whose senile eccentricity caused her to send him blank postcards at regular intervals. Harriet never saw these two people, but at last she noticed that whenever her husband received a card from his crazy aunt, he broke any previous engagement and paid a visit to--the crippled vet.

Wifely curiosity soon got the better of Harriet. One night, she opened Desmond's briefcase and found a manuscript signed with his name. "With reference to Bureaux Instruction," she read, "... I appreciate the vital . . . importance to Soviet security of acquiring the details of Anglo-American general strategy without delay. ... I have taken steps to ensure [my wife's] ignorance and, in view of her youth and political illiteracy, it is impossible for her to entertain the smallest suspicions. . . . [But] I suggest that the method of communicating by blank postcard should be discontinued. . . ."

Bungling Agent. While poor Harriet struggled to decide whether to turn her beloved over to Scotland Yard, "auntie" and the "vet" (two husky Russians who ran the London branch of the "Apparatus") tried to decide what to do about Harriet. Agent Lightfoot was an invaluable spy, but he had up & married a little moron without party consent, and (they decided) she would have to be "eliminated." Obviously, Agent Lightfoot was the man best qualified to do the eliminating. Lightfoot protested, but he took Harriet duck-hunting and tried to blow her head off. When he failed, the Apparatus decided that bungling Agent Lightfoot must be eliminated himself.

How the Apparatus carried out its determination is described in the last, galloping pages of Conspirator--a novel that is too much of a sheer thriller to attain real literary stature, but much too brilliantly written to be classed with ordinary whodunits.

When 41 -year-old Humphrey Slater's Heretics (two novelettes in one volume) appeared last year, critics compared him to Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler. But, as readers of Conspirator will see, Slater does not share Koestler's determination to explore the more subtle and profound characteristics of the revolutionary man. Himself a former leftist enthusiast (he was the International Brigade's chief of operations in the Spanish war), Slater is content to dramatize his lore with such ability that few readers will be able to put down Conspirator before they have reached the last gasp.

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