Bugged

THE ANDERSON TAPES by Lawrence Sanders. 254 pages. Putnam. $5.95.

Every year sees the appearance of fictional contrivances that pause briefly as larvae in book form before butterflying their way onto the screen. But Veteran Pulp Writer Lawrence Sanders has achieved some sort of distinction in the genre. In his very first try at a hardcover book he has created a dreadful hybrid: part novel, part script. It has been a bestseller since the day it left its publisher's cocoon some weeks ago. Grateful Columbia Pictures has already snapped it up for $100,000.

The Anderson Tape's is a standard "big caper" thriller (Topkapi, Rififi) in which a hungry hood just sprung from Sing Sing decides to strip a whole luxury Manhattan apartment house over a Labor Day weekend. He assembles a team of specialists to cut the alarm wires, finger the Klees and terrify any stray remaining tenants. The gimmick is that all the conspirators' haunts are bugged by various government agencies. Though it means that everything from a candy-store pay phone to Central Park itself has to be tapped, almost the whole novel consists of tape-recorded conversations instantly fungible as movie dialogue.

The plot would be entirely diverting if it were not mercilessly weighted down with Ideas. Sanders, alas, has clearly read his Sartre. His hoods are given to observations like "Crime is the truth. Law is the hypocrisy." There is no sex in the usual sense, because the characters prefer to engage in whippings. It turns out that tape is not the ideal medium for dramatizing this kind of eroticism, but there is enough twaddle about the relationship between violent crime and perverted sex to make St. Genet set fire to his halo.

Though Lawrence Sanders apparently intended his criminals to be gritty outcasts, they are actually laughable bores. "This man who fondled himself while I pranced about him clad in chicken feathers," recalls a lady sadist clad in self-righteousness, "this man attended church every Sunday, contributed to charities . . ."

Routine criminal paranoia is more engaging. Says one wary conspirator: "How does anyone know? Maybe one of the rats is wired. Maybe the cockroaches have been trained. How about that! Trained bugs! Not bad, huh?" Not so bad that Mr. Sanders may not try it.

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