Short Notices

THE DETECTIVE by Roderick Thorp. 598 pages. Dial. $5.95.

Those who pursue this detective story to its finish may be reminded of a Rube Goldberg invention, not because it is comically ingenious but because the elaborate machinery of its plot does not justify the picayune results. The awesome bulk of Author Thorp's contraption is achieved by extraneous detail; he is one of those authors who, having informed the reader that some character has picked up a phone, cannot get on with the story before informing the reader that the character has put the phone down. Thorp, his publisher and the Literary Guild (whose June selection it is) are impressed by the book's girth, but no one else should be. The story, about homosexual murder, is unbelievable, the denouement unacceptable. Author Thorp can probably write a readable book if he ever learns to stop answering the telephone.

THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN by Paul Scon. 462 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

Paul Scott, a literary agent turned writer, specializes in the novel of sensibility (The Bender; The Corrida at San Felhi). This one, set in India in 1942, tells of a brash, big-boned English girl with a rage to live and a notion that flouting convention is the way to do it. Self-consciously she befriends a bright, embittered Indian boy; surreptitiously they become lovers. The relationship infuriates the English community and sets a bad example for the peasantry--at least for four Hindu hooligans who rape her one summer evening. The attackers escape, the Indian boy is vindictively jailed on a trumped-up political charge, and peaceful at last, the English girl dies in giving birth to her uncertainly sired child. Author Scott writes with gravity and grace. He has set his scarifying tale within a bloody jungle of Congress Party politicking and imperial British bungling, which he examines informatively and with compassion. He also examines events from every possible viewpoint, successively recounting his story through the eyes of eight widely disparate observers. Even for elusive India, it proves to be about four observers too many.

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