A Round of Ambrose

THE NAKED VILLANY (271 pp.)--Jocelyn Davey--Knopf ($3.50).

Among fictional detectives, the most numerous are the Newton types. Popped on the head by the apples of sinister circumstance, they gravitate to solutions by prodigies of deduction. Amateur Detective Ambrose Usher, an Oxford don, is different. Says a baffled friend: "Things don't happen to you: you happen to things. You walk into a perfectly quiet situation . . ." Replies Ambrose: "Oh, dear. Yes, yes. It may be. I'm the apple itself, perhaps. What an awkward role . . ."

Short, apple-round and learnedly garrulous, Ambrose ambles through his adventures preceded by a pillar of chaos. While bodies are felled and dark deeds are done all about him, the philosophy don lets Bach's Magnificat sing through his mind, ruminates about Hegel, and numbs his listeners with a flow of quotes from the Bible, Shakespeare, major poets and minor limericists. On the track of a murderer, Ambrose, like an unleashed puppy, will spot a new scent--a hitherto unexplored connection between the Book of Kings and the lost Amazonian city of Pirahuanaco.

In Author Davey's first novel, A Capitol Offense (TIME, Aug. 6, 1956), a middle-aged Ambrose righted wrongs in Washington, D.C.; the present book, set in 1937, shows the philosopher as a younger man, paddling after evildoers in Oxford and London. Ambrose has just done a job of espionage in civil-war-torn Spain to accommodate a friend in the Foreign Office, and he wants a few weeks of peace before the fall term starts at Oxford. But he needs money (he has worked out a scheme to pauperize the Grimaldis' gambling hell at Monte Carlo), and a millionaire industrialist offers him -L-500 to truffle out some missing Bach concertos.

The plot from here on resembles something built of blocks by a small boy, and then partly destroyed by his dog. Ambrose is deviled by a beautiful lady biochemist, a drug-taking mystic and an evil-looking chauffeur. Someone tries to mash him with a big black car. A tribe of monkeys is mislaid and a corpse or two are discovered. A tappy old duchess who collects causes starts to lecture on the class war at a workers' meeting, absentmindedly switches to a harangue on the dangers of premature burial.

If this were really a detective story, it would be unfair to report that Ilona, the slinky Hungarian blonde, really has nothing to do with the plot, or to warn the reader about the sneaky German archaeologist who thinks he has found a piece of a Dead Sea Scroll. But the book is less a whodunit than a witty who-said-it--in Author Davey's phrase, a shakerful of "the martini of human kindness." Very dry, too, without unnecessary olives.

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When Ambrose Usher first bubbled into print, London critics hooted happily that the model for the talkative detective was obviously brilliant, pudgy Sir Isaiah Berlin, Oxford don, author (The Hedgehog and the Fox), cross-country conversationalist and, during World War II, a first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. Jocelyn Davey was a nom de plume, and there seemed good reason to suspect that Sir Isaiah might be Author Davey, as well as Hero Usher. To save a fellow Reform Club member from disrepute, the real author stepped forward: brilliant, pudgy Chaim ("Rab") Raphael, who was at Oxford with Sir Isaiah, lectured there in Biblical studies from 1932-39, served from 1942-57 with the British Information Services in the U.S.

While assuring everyone that he is "nothing like as erudite as my hero," he admits: "I find it increasingly hard to distinguish myself from him these days." Like the detective, Rab Raphael--now the British Treasury's chief press officer--is musically literate; he may read through the scores of Beethoven's Rasaumowsky quartets while traveling or sing a Schubert sonata in the bathtub. Says he: "I always sing the left-hand part of a piano piece or the cello part in a quintet. You can hear the whole thing that way."

This summer Rab is gently stirring a third round of Ambrose.

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