A WORLD TO WIN

There seems never to be a question as to whether or not a new Lanny Budd novel will sell. It will. This one has the familiar ingredients:- full quota of yesterday's headlines served up with applesauce, as the intrepid Superman, Lanny Budd, playboy of Europe's capitals, expert on art, friend of Nazi sympathizers, and- in reality- F.D.R.'s "presidential agent"- uses all this as front for investigation under the actuality of wartorn Europe. This panel in his adventures starts with an interview in Vicky France with Laval and ends with an interview in Moscow under siege with Stalin- the span, 1940 to 1948. He continues his hazardous career, with one crack in the armor when he is virtually booted from Britain as suspect; he even trains intensively under Prof. Einstein so that he may enter Nazi Germany once again and extract some secrets of atomic investigation and bring them back to America; he takes an enforced six months' furlough as a result of a plane crash; and he solves his "to do or not to do" emotional tangles by having fate dispose neatly of the insistent Lizbeth, leaving him with Laurel in Hongkong, and marriage as the answer to the problem of their escape. One finishes the 700 pages wondering anew at Upton Sinclair's facility in spinning a plot from hackneyed thread, dated colloquialisms and cliches — and making it incontrovertibly readable- and saleable.