Goose-Flesh Impresarios

AMBUSH FOR THE HUNTER (307 pp.)--F. L Green--Random House ($3).

AN EPITAPH FOR LOVE (252 pp.)--Howard Clev/es--Doubleday ($3.50).

The average whodunit never solves its most conspicuous crime--the murder of the King's English. But there are a few mystery writers who do not use the pen as a blunt instrument. Such are Britain's Howard Clewes and the late F. L. Green.* Neither An Epitaph for Love nor Ambush for the Hunter will floor anyone with surprises, but each crackles with suspense and crisp, literate prose.

Cozy Purgatory. Perhaps the more accomplished of the two gooseflesh impresarios is F. L. (Odd Man Out) Green. His Ambush for the Hunter uncoils in a simple setting of domestic infelicity. Charles and Edna are a middle-aged London couple who have been putting a good face on their bad marriage for so long that they have almost forgotten what it really looks like. Charles is a well-placed civil servant with the aplomb of a head waiter and the moral fiber of an eel. Edna retreats into a cocoon of modern books, music and art. Into this cozy purgatory of ask-me-no-questions, Author Green drops a woman, not just any woman, but an overnight celebrity named Eva Droumek.

Eva has won asylum in England as an anti-Communist refugee who loosened a few rivets in Czechoslovakia's Iron Curtain. Edna is still reading about the exploit in the papers when Charles shows up with Eva and announces that she will stay the week. With her intuitive antennae out a mile, Edna spots Eva as phony, senses that Charles knows it too and soon realizes that Charles knows that she knows.

As the war of nerves develops, Charles is revealed as a crypto-Communist and Eva as a Soviet spy. Edna finds that she still loves Charles too much to give his scheme away. But matters are not really in her hands, for in the background lurk two rival espionage teams, led by a vulpine Commie and a cagey British agent. Between them, they pull the plot strings of Ambush into a tight, ironic noose.

Twist of the Knife. Love mislaid on the altar of totalitarian politics is also the theme of An Epitaph for Love. Like the Green thriller, it is full of brooding atmospherics and clever character analysis. The hero, Harry Lucas, is a footloose English writer in Florence, inwardly reliving the wartime days when he worked with the Italian partisans. His most haunting memory : a tug of war between love and loyalty, in which he turned in his girl Nina to the partisan chief Giulio because she was a German agent. The wound is reopened and history re-enacted when Florence is threatened with a Communist coup led by Giulio. But this time it is a ravaged and vengeful Nina who betrays Harry to Giulio. What happens when Giulio is murdered and Harry faces Nina again gives Author Clewes his title and a last twist-of-the-knife ending.

* Not to be confused with British Novelists Greene (Graham) and Green (Henry).

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