Winners Take Nothing

THE LOSER (308 pp.)--Peter Ustinov --Little, Brown ($4.50).

If Actor-Playwright Peter Ustinov were to ad-lib a novel on the stage or before a TV camera, it might turn out very well. With his wit, his storyteller's flair and his crafty talent for wedding the ridiculous to the dramatic, he might easily become an important prose bard. But Ustinov wants to write. While he did reasonably well in his engaging 1957 comedy, Romanoff and Juliet, he failed badly last year in his book of short stories. Add a Dash of Pity. To his credit, Ustinov refuses to quit: he has written a first novel.

The mind that conceived The Loser is obviously steeped in good will. But as its author says when speaking of his Nazi non-hero: "As so often happens, pen and mind tell a different story." Hans Winterschild, a Nazi infantry officer, is the loser of the title, and so, by reasonable extension, is Germany. But what if Hans and Hitler had been the winners? There are times when The Loser all but implies that the Allies would have been proved wrong, or so a cynic could argue. Hans is a case-history figure, a dedicated Nazi who never had to contend with conscience. When he is ordered to destroy an entire town, he does his part with no questions asked. Men, women and children are methodically shot down, the church burned with all who had gone there to seek sanctuary. To make his creaky plot hold together, Ustinov has Hans fall in love with a Florentine prostitute during the German retreat. When, quite out of character, he comes back to find her, he is sniffed out by the police and pursued as a war criminal.

The long chase proves that Author Ustinov has not yet mastered the art of creating suspense, but it does give him a chance to do what he does best : hold up national types to clever, cynical scrutiny. His police colonel is cast as a stock Italian official, part scoundrel, part ingratiating humanist, both parts cemented by Machiavellian guile. The head of the German escape ring could be found in Central Casting along with all the lesser characters.

Hans loses out, of course, but not until Ustinov has worked some of the most quixotic flimflam in recent fiction. Characters deliver speeches that are fluent and often funny but almost never credible. What The Loser leaves behind is a sense of regret that so many nice touches have been wasted, so much comic flair dissipated in a search for what is obviously a serious statement about war, its terrors and follies.

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