A DANDY IN ASPIC

This one is to be launched with lots of hoopla as the Deighton-Le Carre successor, to go all the way. Perhaps not. Dandy's a Wilde conceit and it's really quite tame. It's also parody and some of the humor seems recherche and hard reached for. The aesthete of the title is one Alexander Eberlin, an agent for the British; but he's also Krasnevin, an agent for the Russians who has been in England for eighteen years, living in isolated boredom, cultivating the fetish of himself, his clothes, his Sevres china. He wants to be repatriated and the Russians refuse, just before the English demand that he eliminate Krasnevin. They have a picture of Krasnevin and he looks, no, not like Eberlin but like Pavel, another of their men. The random confusion which follows takes place in a and around London and Berlin and at the end Dandy is seen going back to England to One of the nicest things about this gentle gentleman are the maxims he contributes to each chapter--ibid ""The surest way to be out of fashion tomorrow is to be in the forefront of it today."" Who knows. Although he's quite a switch he seems not quite right for this Flesh and Blood genre. Maybe he'll come off better on celluloid (the film is on the way) than under glass.