Despite the advent of television, people apparently still like to read good stories. These novels, the first by a well established writer and the other by a former journalist now earning a deserved reputation as a novelist, provide both the kind of entertainment value offered by a good television series and a bonus of the kind of intellectual stimulation which is normally expunged by the masters of the screen. Of the two, I would guess that Moffitt's is the better commodity for the medium, but this is only because West spends more of his space writing about ideas which Moffitt is content to leave implicit, and which our television masters would regard as anathema.