*They Wouldn't Stop Talking by John Pollock (Anthony Blond, 1964)

 

Because I so enjoyed reading Pollock's The Grass Beneath the Wire (see below), I bought his two other novels, and read this one first.

It's October, which means the season is over and everyone has left the Italian island of x.  But the narrator, a young, alcoholic, gigilo-ish man and his friend and keeper, an older woman named Helen, remain on the island staying in the only hotel that hasn't closed, eating and drinking (lots) on credit because they don't have the money to go anywhere else (Helen is expecting a large sum of money but its arrival is delayed).  They befriend Gustavo, a Swedish man who is developing holiday properties on the island, and Barbara, his German secretary.  A wealthy American couple arrive at the hotel and provide some diversion and amusement, but as the weeks and months pass, our narrator begins hearing a multitude of voices talking to him, and plotting on behalf of "The Avenger," the leader of the organization to which they all belong, to capture him and torture him to punish him for some crimes or behaviors that aren't specified.

So the book becomes a psychological thriller.  It is intermittently amusing -- the voices can be quite funny as they squabble and plot, but because the narrator is rather a cypher and the paranoiac plot rather familiar, the book is only distinguished by Pollock's acid and amusing writing, resulting in a book that just barely sustains its short length.