Macguffin a Matter of Honor

By John Skow

Jeffrey Archer is a writer of beach books (Kane & Abel; First Among Equals) who was once the youngest member of the House of Commons, and is now deputy chairman of Britain's Conservative Party. As writerly credentials go, these are well up on the customary "shipped out on a tramp steamer" and "parachuted into occupied France."

The trouble is with the author's photo on the reverse side of his new book, a shrewd and amiable thriller called A Matter of Honor. Archer is shown in full color, posing authoritatively in a blue pinstripe power suit, and carries an open volume, perhaps one of his previous tomes. His smile is that of a man who would not be surprised if a headwaiter applauded.

This will not do. Horowitz wears tails, Roger Clemens a Red Sox uniform, and thriller writers, according to tradition, are caparisoned in creased outerwear, lurking beside bridge abutments in the fog. Archer is radiant and fogproof. With a lesser talent, this miscalculation could have been fatal. After all, when one of Eric Ambler's down-at-the-heels protagonists makes a dodgy border crossing, the tension is palpable. Readers know that if the policeman in the greasy uniform were a shade more intelligent, he would realize that the hero's accent is bogus, his passport fake. An author who sees himself in boardroom costume, however, seems unlikely to grasp the concepts of weary connivance that nourish the standard thriller.

Archer's hero is Adam Scott, a former British army captain who goes on the run and has trouble crossing borders. The pages turn amusingly, and secret agents from several nations chase the protagonist with vigor and invention. But all this hare-and-hounding is the result of a mixup, and one suspects quite early on that when that nice Captain Scott is given a hearing, it will be the agents who are in trouble.

Even so, Archer is a master entertainer, and on the trail he produces one of the best MacGuffins of recent popular fiction. (MacGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's name for the object or secret that sets the plot churning.) The time is 1966, and Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, no less, is trying desperately to find a famous icon spirited away from the Winter Palace in the last days of the Czar. It passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring, who gave it to Scott's father, his jailer after World War II. The late Scott Sr., in turn, confided its whereabouts to his son.

But the icon itself, though valuable, is merely the box that contains the MacGuffin, an astonishing and unsuspected 19th century document. It seems that in 1867, when the world thought that Russia had sold a certain large piece of real estate to a young Western power for $7 million, what was really signed (and nicknamed Seward's folly) was only a 99-year lease. A crucial clause allows the Soviet Union to reclaim its property by paying a large sum in gold before the lease expires. Brezhnev, a stonehearted landlord, rubs his hands and plots eviction. Will Scott and the female bass-fiddle player who has befriended him make it across the right border? Will the property end up in the wrong hands? The questions are well worth pursuing to their odd conclusions. Rival thrillers may offer a more glamorously seedy cast, but name another book that ends by giving its readers a jolly good cross-country ride -- and a portion of Baked Alaska.