Helen MacInnes is deservedly known as the Queen of Spy Writers. Writing from 1941 until 1983, just before her death is 1985, her stories of espionage and innocents being caught up in the web of political intrigue are as timeless as a Hitchcock thriller. You can easily imagine casting the films with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, Gene Hackman and Lois Chiles, or Michael Fassbinder and Juliette Binoche, as the leads - depending on the decade.
In Prelude To Terror, art dealer Colin Grant has the opportunity to travel to Vienna to purchase a masterwork at auction. His buyer will remain anonymous. Meeting him at the airport is a driver who greets/diverts him, and he is suddenly caught between two groups: Avril Hoffman and Robert Renwick (NATO?) and Gene Marck and the mysterious Lois Westerbrook (of unknown allegiance?). Shuffled into a network of underground spies and co-opted by both sides, he manages to maintain balance in a world where no one is what they seem, where the smiling face of a new friend conceals the revolver about to strike. There are so many characters with dual roles, you really begin to wonder who is on our heroes side, and who will make it out alive, right up to the final pages. All involved wish to complete the sham auction - for Grant to fill the coffers of the Nazis with fresh funds, while legally smuggling out assumed priceless artworks. MacInnes builds the tension to a high point at the halfway mark, then introduces a finale built on intrigue and hand to hand justice.
A winner all round, MacInnes is consistently solid and Prelude to Terror is not an exception. Her thrillers are built on intelligence and the mystery of what is not said - complex plots with consistent interest. Her two books following this one (The Hidden Target and Cloak of Darkness) also feature Robert Renwick.
My copy was from the Titan Books series of reprints (all with uniformly clever covers), which unfortunately contained many printing errors: Four times a period was used in the middle of a sentence where a comma belonged, three times a set of quotation marks was missing its mate, once a period in the middle of a sentence for unknown reason, and an obvious spelling error on page 133. As a careful reader, these jump off the page, as I wonder who did the proofreading, and what will be discovered as I read the rest of the series.
1978 / Tradeback / 432 pages
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