Word: harlequins
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...HARLEQUIN by MORRIS WEST 324 pages. Morrow...
...stem of the wineglass snapped in his fingers and the liquor spilled like blood on the white napery," Morris West reports at a tense moment in this thriller about international banking. The sentence tells most of what the prospective thrillee needs to know about Harlequin. Not very long after the invention of the novel, literature divided into two mighty streams, one in which wineglass-stem snapping during moments of tension was impermissible and another in which it was obligatory. Admirers of one stream do not go boating on the other...
Those inclined to press on regardless of what spills on the napery will have no trouble imagining a dashing Swiss banker named George Harlequin. He is a master of eight or ten languages and all women who see him, he plays a Spanish guitar passably, and in matters relating to Eurodollars he is a past master. But as the novel begins, he lies ill and helpless in a Los Angeles hospital...
Enter the villain, Basil Yanko, a Yankee basilisk whose mysterious firm, Creative Systems, runs Harlequin's computer operations. He makes two announcements to Paul Desmond, Harlequin's loyal aide: 1) he is prepared to buy out Harlequin, for a suspiciously high figure, and 2) computer print-outs show that Harlequin himself has embezzled $15 million from his own company. It is clear, of course, that Yanko and his minions (this is the sort of novel in which the villain has minions) have framed Harlequin. But can this be proved to the international banking community? And what about Yanko...
What turns a normal woman into a Harlequin junkie? The formula requires three ingredients: an exotic setting (Rome, the Caribbean, Africa), a demure heroine whose modest station in life is similar to the reader's, and a usually rich, arrogant hero who initially patronizes the heroine, then sweeps her off her feet "like a leaf in the wind" into a blissful, totally unLiberated marriage. Curses never go beyond an impetuous hero's "God's teeth!" ("What a shocking remark!" exclaims the heroine.) Sex never gets further than a kiss, but manages to crop up in perfervid abundance...