Books: Notable

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THE RAINBIRD PATTERN by VICTOR CANNING 244 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

The engaging villain, sympathetic in his evil, is at least as old as Milton's Satan. But Victor Canning, a master craftsman of English thrillers, has managed to conjure up a variation. He is Edward Shoebridge, a saturnine hunter, a falconer who feels pollution and plastic closing in and coldly uses crime to raise the money to escape to some rustic Scandinavian fortress. His business is kidnaping high political figures in impeccable style. He takes his ransom in uncut diamonds.

Canning's story is brisk, but one cherishes his characters. Blanche Tyler, a blowsily sensual gypsy medium, is commissioned, innocently enough, to locate Shoebridge as the heir to a fortune. Amiable George Lumley, a garrulous middle-aged failure, does Blanche's detective work for a fee—and a night in bed. Then there is Miss Rainbird, a conventional spinster and country heiress out of Jane Austen.

The story sometimes suggests James Bond in the 19th century. Blanche practices a tacky spiritualism, but Canning never quite debunks her ghosts. A spirit world flickers on the edges of the plot. The precise rationalism of government investigators softly edges toward the ambiguous realm of séances and contacts with the dead, like a drunk motorist drifting off the road. The total effect is eerily absorbing. At the end, Canning's story is a bit tricky and brutal, but it is somehow charming all the same, and even persuasively ominous.

HOWARD'S BAG by DOUGLASS WALLOP 208 pages. Norton. $6.95.

Unlike his fellow passengers on the 7:58 from Welton, Conn., Howard Carew is no middle-class striver. He commutes to a corporate job in Manhattan each day all right, but he has long since decided that the rat race is tedious, unrewarding and—most important—unnecessary to his survival. Howard does have a vocation, however. He lies for fun and profit.

His deceits are grand and complicated. He has persuaded his wife and his primary employer that the editorship of an occasionally published house organ constitutes demanding, full-time employment. His Manhattan mistress and his favorite bartender believe he is an agent for the CIA. To keep body and body together in town while financing family life in Connecticut, Howard secretly sells real estate. To him an old ruin is a "very good house for learning household skills."

Pinocchio's nose grew longer with each fib. Howard's merely twitches in private glee at each deception. Up to this point, Douglass Wallop (The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, The Good Life) has created an amusing if implausible scoundrel and a book that makes suitable summer reading on those winter flights to Miami or points south. The problem with Howard's Bag is how to teach an old gimmick new tricks. With preposterous ease, Howard's truth-loving new secretary catches on to his secret and converts him to her own uncomfortable creed. The reformed sinner sets off to attack conventional hypocrisy, instead of trading on it as he used to. The author apparently intended a series of hard and funny confrontations as Howard, now obsessed with mendacity, tries to force his neighbors to give up even the small lies that make life comfortable. Instead, the book softens to a moralistic goo.