Richard Hoyt-having ridden the train across

the USSR-is back again. In THE MANNA

ENZYME, Fidel Castro, incognito, headed for

a shootout in the mountains of Oregon.

In TROTSKY S RUN, a man who thought he

was Leon Trotsky ran for President. In COOL

RUNNINGS, the French Surete sent a pot-head

writer to intercept an atomic bomb headed for

Manhattan.

The critics and a growing following love Hoyt s

off:beat thrillers, common only in that they are

fast moving, original, sophisticated, and superbly

written.

Consider Hoyt s discovery that there existed-

exists still-a mound near the southeast corner of

Red Square called Lobnoye Mesto, the Place of

the Skull. The medieval Muscovites believed

Lobnoye Mesto was the center of the earth-radi-

ating a secret power that would make Moscow the

Third Rome; Russians would rule the world.

HEAD OF STATE begins with the 1924

funeral of the revolutionary messiah, V. 1. Lenin.

One of Lenin s pallbearer, Joseph Stalin, under-

stands the power of the myth and so has Lenin

embalmed, turning him into a secular icon-and

very neatly creates a Marxist Lobnoye Mesto at

the base of the Kremlin wall.

Sixty years later, poet Isaak Ginsburg is sent to

the Gulag and suffers an unspeakable outrage.

On his release, Ginsburg sets about to qualify for

foreign travel - in order to defect - by pulling a

literary sting: he writes poetry the Soviets like to

hear. Then he meets an Estonian, Jaan Birk, who

has a grudge of his own and wants to get even.

Birk proposes that they steal Lenin s head.

With the help of Ginsburg s lover, Natalia