Summer Twist

SO LONG AT THE FAIR (212 pp.) Anthony Thorne-- Random House ($2.50)

"Rooms 38 and 39," says the smiling desk clerk at the Paris hotel, handing over the keys; "you have come to see our great Exposition?" Vicky Barton and her brother John take the keys, sign the register, climb the red-carpeted stairs to their rooms. To Vicky's horror, next morning, both John and Room 39 are gone.

"Yes, Mademoiselle?" asks the desk clerk, giving Vicky a fishy stare. "What has become of Monsieur Barton, your brother? But how should we know, Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle herself ought to recall that she arrived unescorted yesterday. Room 39? Room 39, Mademoiselle, has always been the lavabo. Mademoiselle looks faint, and perhaps is not well."

Readers with even a 20-watt memory ought to recognize this old eye-popper. Some may recall it as a favorite parlor puzzle a decade or two ago. The late Alexander Woollcott published a breathless version in which the missing person is an elderly woman; in Mrs. Belloc Lowndes' The End of Her Honeymoon (1914) it is a young husband. All are variations on the same theme: a victim vanishes, leaving no sign of his existence; in feverish haste his hotel room is refurnished, repapered or walled off. The hotelkeeper (sometimes it is the police) has reason to dispose of the victim without alarming the city.

The plot is heavy with age, but British Novelist Anthony Thorne manages to lighten it with a summer-weight touch and a twist or two of his own.

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