SHADOW OF PERIL

The story of a Soviet spy sub that penetrates New York harbor, this exercise in escape-hatch nonfiction-fiction sports impressive credibility of detail, though its Russians are B-movie stereotypes. And that they are, with Good seagoing personnel pitted against Bad party commissars. At one point, clean-living, brave submarine commander Aleksandr Zhdanov ups periscope and nearly bangs it against John Glenn's bobbling space capsule. He sights on the capsule, to sink it. But Glenn is clean-living and brave too! ""Sink the bastard!"" cries the Bad commissar,-- and an imaginative writer might have done just that. But Aleksandr has even greater problems than sinking the Good Glenn. While visiting Washington in 1959, he'd heard a hymn in the Anglican Cathedral, and ever since he's been wrestling with God. In moments of crisis he sometimes cries, ""God!"" Two commissars separately report this to Moscow and by heaven if he isn't put on trial, with Castro's prettiest vice doll informing that she once went to church with him. Unfortunately, the story which started off wildly but well, sinks slowly, and up rises an oilslick of sentiment as the hero defects into the arms of the Prince of Peace..... Shades of the Warner Brethren.