PAPER MATES

Chasing each other into American bookstores this month, novelists Robert Harris and Sebastian Faulks have become acknowledged masters of the literate historical thriller, with a mix of politics, sex, and ear chases that has Hollywood hooked as well

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The novelists Sebastian Faulks and Robert Harris have a spooky number of things in common. Apart from both publishing new books in the U.S. this month, they hogged the British best-seller lists last fall for weeks with their classy historical thrillers; they're both as English as treason; both are Cambridge graduates and journalists; both are obsessed with 20th-century arenas of war; both examine the limits of truth and courage; and both have a filmic apotheosis around the corner. Faulks's screenplay of his massive-selling Birdsong is still awaiting the final polish before exploding onto celluloid. Harris's first book, Fatherland, was filmed, unsuccessfully, for HBO. Mick Jagger acquired the rights to his second novel, Enigma, with a Tom Stoppard screenplay, while Mel Gibson has bought up Archangel.

Both authors reveal a didactic streak in their work. Charlotte Gray plunges Faulks's titular Scots miss into occupied France to work for the Resistance and try to locate her lost airman boyfriend, but the book's darker purpose is to explore the mentality of French collaborators under the Vichy regime. In Archangel, Harris imagines the discovery of Stalin's private papers, long suppressed by the chief of the secret police, and the prospect of a revived Man of Steel stalking the power meridians of modern-day Moscow. Faulks is condemnatory; Harris is alarmingly playful. You can almost imagine them as brothers: Faulks the older (45), the man of action, all cricket scars and self-deprecation but chasing high seriousness; Harris the junior (41), a quick study full of erudition and donnish humor who wants to make your flesh creep. Between them they've cornered a lucrative market in historical, and moral, revisionism, plus car chases, border guards, and sex in the blackouts.

JOHN WALSH