Innocents Abroad

ABOVE SUSPICION--Helen MacInnes--Little, Brown ($2.50).

It is clear that Author Helen MacInnes has studied the slick screen thrillers of her compatriot Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, etc.). Her first novel makes fast reading. Speeded up to her master's pace, it would make still better screening.

In the summer of '39 a young Oxford don and his personable wife put their vacation at the disposal of the British Intelligence. Their assignment: to find out whether a certain invaluable British secret agent was still functioning in Central Europe. Their qualifications: native intelligence and the fact that, as genteel trippers, they are Above Suspicion. Result: a tense maze of typically Hitchcock bit players, business and hairbreadth escapes.

Items:

> Elaborate high-signs involving music, spilt Cointreau, inverted wrist watches, roses.

> A tour, complete with travel notes, of Paris, Nuernberg, Innsbruck and the Austrian Tyrol, all on the thin edge of war.

> Such sets as a Paris literary cabaret; a cavernous, musty, Nazinfested hotel; a museum of instruments of torture.

> Auto chases, abductions, disguises, false passports, the underground railway for refugees.

> A ferocious wolfhound; a sinister man in black riding a bicycle hell-for-leather; some well-arranged surprise appearances of old faces.

> The wife's over-gallant, pestiferous insistence on not being left out of the fun; some neatly managed Anglo-American propaganda; a safe outcome for the adventure, with the tagline: "This isn't the end for any of us. It's just the beginning."

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