Queen of the Spies

THE DOUBLE IMAGE by Helen MacInnes. 309 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.75.

Dr. Gilbert Highet, head of the classics department at Columbia University, recalls that he was particularly busy that winter. Then a professor of Greek and Latin, he had taken on a new course, and night after night he sat at his desk composing his lectures. Meanwhile, his wife sat on the couch near by, quietly scribbling away with a pencil. One evening she stopped, drew a firm line on the paper and said with a sigh of relief, "There. That's done. Would you like to read it?" Highet said rather vaguely, "Yes, of course." He started to read the pages covered with his wife's precise handwriting, and discovered to his amazement that it was a suspense tale about a British couple who undertook a mission for the Foreign Office under the noses of the Nazis in Germany. He was unable to put the manuscript down until he had read the last page.

That was in the winter of 1940-41.

Industrious Mrs. Highet's first casual attempt at fiction, titled Above Suspicion and published under her maiden name, Helen MacInnes, became a runaway bestseller and a first-rate film. Since then, periodically and with unhurried ease, she has sat down with pencil and paper and turned out such bestselling yarns of international intrigue as Assignment in Brittany, North from Rome, Decision at Delphi and The Venetian Affair. All told, her twelve novels have sold more than 4,000,000 copies and have been translated into 19 languages. Five have been sold to the movies.

Slightly Roundheeled. The Double Image is Author Maclnnes' 13th book, and as usual it is riding high on most bestseller lists, with 70,000 copies in print. Also as usual, the hero is firm-chinned, clean-limbed--this time a young American economist named John Craig who, armed only with good manners and innocence, is recruited to help thwart an ingenious Communist scheme to penetrate U.S. security. The plot involves a trip to the Greek island of Mykonos, and MacInnes evokes a picture of its windswept charm, just as in previous books she evoked the charm of Brittany, Venice and Berlin. Despite the current mania for Bondian gadgetry, her spies still hide their microfilms in hollowed-out tie clasps; neither her heroes nor villains spill gore, and her hussy enemy spies suggest, but only suggest, that their heels are slightly rounded.

What MacInnes does best is write a literate and believable story of suspense. At 58, she is a member of a disappearing breed, a natural storyteller who attempts neither to spoof her readers nor impress them with literary pretension. Her sole concern is a good story, and her characters are neither clowns nor antihero supermen, but human beings.

Writing to Ravel. She is, in short, the acknowledged queen of spy story writers, and a handsome queen of great charm to boot. Possessed of a Scottish burr and a Glasgow University master of arts degree, she married Gilbert Highet, an Oxford don, in 1932. Five years later, Highet was invited to lecture at Columbia, and the Highets moved to New York with their three-year-old son Keith, now 32 and a Manhattan lawyer. The Highets were so taken with Columbia and New York that they decided to remain; they became citizens in 1951.

After 33 years of marriage and comfortable success, both the Highets are positive they complement each other perfectly. His background of classicism has given depth and flavor to her work, and her interest in light fiction has given a human edge to his scholarship. Both are gifted amateur pianists; for relaxation they play duets on two baby grands placed back to back in their comfortable Park Avenue apartment. They always write to music from a constantly playing stereo. Says MacInnes, "It never bothers me. I just think, 'Oh, there's Ravel,' like an old friend in the room."

In one way, The Double Image does differ from other MacInnes thrillers.

While working on it she developed a bad case of writer's cramp. She tried writing with her left hand without success. In desperation, she turned to an electric typewriter. "But it was as if the typewriter were whining for the next sentence," she says. Finally she tried a regular typewriter, and the book flowed. "Mr. Highet says that this book is crisper and more concise because of the typewriter," she says triumphantly. And perhaps he is right.

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