Essay: SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

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High points go to readers of biography, particularly if the book is longwinded and the subject long dead. Top scorer at many dinner tables this fall will be the man who has read L. Pearce Williams' Michael Faraday (531 pages) and can laconically explain how the 19th century English scientist contributed to Einstein's General Field Theory. For the average nonreader, however, the safest summer investment might well be one of the numerous British novelists who produce short, superbly written books on subjects of total inconsequence: Octogenarian Frank Swinnerton, for example, who learned to write when Proust was an apprentice, and has turned out more than 30 novels of manners and malice (his latest: Quadrille) with a fine disregard for every development in fiction over the past 60 years.

An even more painless stratagem is to latch on to a mystery or thriller writer who is not yet widely known. Fleming and le Carré, of course, are old-gat. So are Britain's Len Deighton (The Ipcress File) and John Creasey (Death of an Assassin), whose books have been made into movies. Georges Simenon, the prolific French author whose Inspector Maigret has solved more than 60 book-length cases to date, has yet to win a mass following in the U.S., despite his fine ear for Gallic nuance and a geographer's eye for locale. One enterprising reader, 1965 Harvard Graduate Roy Cobb, recently rediscovered Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu books, he predicts, are a sure bet for rediscovery—at least by the camp set. But some of the best contemporary mystery writers remain curiously underappreciated. Among them are Englishman Andrew Garve (The Cuckoo Line Affair); John D. MacDonald, the O'Hara of the whodunit; Australia's Arthur W. Upfield, whose detective hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, is half aborigine; Donald Hamilton, whose Matt Helm is a sort of Yankee 007; and Ed McBain, a master of suspenseful prose, who in real life is Evan Hunter, author of The Blackboard Jungle.

The ultimate purpose of reading for points should be to tranquilize the non-reader's guilt and restore his self-confidence. One sure sign that the non-bookworm has turned and is reading for pleasure instead of improvement comes when he switches from hardbacks to paperbacks. It is almost an article of faith nowadays that paperbacks are for reading, hard-covers for coffee tables. Though the big-book syndrome lingers on among some bona-fide readers, notably Ivy League freshmen returning on home visits to the cultural outback, any volume big enough to be spotted three lounge chairs away immediately puts its owner in doubt.

Maximizers & Repeaters