Too Many Subtitles

A KIND OF ANGER by Eric Ambler. 311 pages. Atheneum. $4.95.

A wealthy Iraqian refugee is shot to death in the bedroom of his secluded Swiss villa. A black Mercedes 3005 piloted by a beautiful girl roars away into the snowy night. The refugee turns out to have been the ex-chief of Iraq's security forces, who was conspiring against his government. The vanished girl turns out to be his French mistress, Lucia Bernardi. There is a missing suitcase full of documents. There are oil interests. And when the police of three countries are stumped, there is even Piet Maas, a brilliant, disillusioned young Dutch journalist who is told by his boss to Find That Girl! Cut! Next scene: the sunny Riviera . . .

Ten times in the past 27 years, Author Ambler has taken ingredients not unlike these and distilled his own aromatic blend of 160-proof suspense--sometimes with the smoky overtones of his early A Coffin for Dimitrios, sometimes with the dry, fruity tang of last year's The Light of Day (bubblingly filmed by Jules Dassin as Topkapi). This time, unfortunately, somebody's been tinkering with the formula. As Piet and Lucia go through their appointed rounds of deception and huff-and-puff chase, the reader begins to realize that too many of the motivations are phony, too much of the real action takes place offscreen, while too much of the onscreen talk comes out with a kind of freshly translated stiffness, as though the characters were speaking directly in English subtitles.

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