A Crime of Weakness

MIST ON THE WATERS (250 pp.)--F. L. Green--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

F. L. Green is an English novelist (Odd Man Out; A Flask for the Journey) with a special knack for portraying the terrors of obscure city people. His aim: to steer a middle course between the bloodstained thriller and the bloodless novel of ideas. His latest novel achieves it. Mist on the Waters is a taut telling of a crime of weakness, and of the forces it releases in the lives of its perpetrators.

Barty Fingal, a stringy bit of town scum, and his pal Pelancey, a handsome but dim-witted giant, find a compromising letter in a jacket sent to Pelancey's dry-cleaning shop. They decide to blackmail the man who wrote it, and their scheme is so successful that the poor fellow commits suicide.

Prepared Destruction. From there on, the novel moves with accumulating speed. Ratty little Fingal begins to tremble for his skin. He has "gone too far into evil ... a climax towards which his whole life in its indolence and evil has been foolishly shaping." Pelancey is gnawed by deeper fears: his clumsy conscience eats at his heart. "I'm warning you, Barty," he says, "you can't get rid of it. It's done . . . Only thing to do is to put up with it, and say nothing."

But their fears unloose their tongues. Fingal and Pelancey are soon suspected by several people: Pelancey's clerk who overhears their quarrel; his devout cleaning girl, who drags the truth out of him and urges him to confess; Barty's shrewd old mother; and the dead man's former mistress.

Having prepared their own destruction, Pelancey and Fingal are finally driven to half-ludicrous, half-pathetic efforts at confession and penance. Perhaps the worst of it, for Fingal, is seeing himself in his true identity, "in all its shabby unworthiness." Pelancey learns his bitter bit of wisdom: "What's the sense in running away, when you know that at the end o' the journey you'll meet yourself?"

Ulcerated Hearts. Confess and do penance as they will, they can neither undo their crime nor heal the ulcers in their hearts; for, says Author Green, the consequences of a crime of weakness are as terrible as those of a crime of strength. A fire in Pelancey's shop destroys them: "They spoke to each other, incoherently . . . until the very last moment of life, holding firmly to each other as they lay there beneath the beams . . ."

Readers may be disturbed by two weaknesses in this otherwise skillful story: its occasional lapses into stilted novelistic cliches, and its too convenient ending which veils coincidence with the appearance of fatality. But for the most part, Mist on the Waters is as good as a first-rate movie thriller. With somebody like Barry Fitzgerald playing the part of Barty Fingal, Hollywood could have a story to work with.

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