Clues and Refunds

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL

by STANLEY ELLIN 179 pages. Random House. $5.95.

In his earlier puzzlements, Ellery Queen used to enjoy tweaking amateur sleuths by stopping short of the final Byzantine solution long enough to issue a "Challenge to the Reader" to match clues and wits with the smug author. In his newest novel, Stanley Ellin goes Queen one better. He offers the reader a refund instead of a contest.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall comes with the last pages bound by a yellow paper band, slim but snug, that boasts that anyone who "can resist the startling ending" should return the book to the publishers, band still intact, for full reimbursement. Such a stunt may deflect attention from a contrived Freudian somersault about an attorney whose sordid sexual history makes a formidably damaging brief in his own nightmarish, fantasy trial for murder.

The setup is classic. "The lady's remains repose on my bathroom floor," Attorney Peter Hibben tells us, "in my own locked, barred, closed-circuit-TV-guarded apartment." The body is costumed like the leading light of a Belle Epoque bordello. Carmina Burana swells in from the living-room phonograph. The girl has been shot. The attorney recognizes the gun, a six-shot Smith & Wesson K38 Heavy Masterpiece. He does not recognize the girl.

Hibben sacks his seamy past for a clue to her identity, or any inkling of how she got into his apartment and his life. His exwife, his son, his parents, even his psychiatrist--all appear to Hibben in his delirium, prodding him inexorably toward the unpleasant Krafft-Ebing revelation concealed behind that coy yellow band. In the denouement there are traces both of Psycho and the Roger Ackroyd device: Are you sure you should trust the narrator? But Ellin conceals his key surprise in a phonetic note written by a distracted Mexican housemaid: Noscool sonic comic loc. Work that out and the solution may fall into place. Since the note appears on page 21, well before the band, Random House is jeopardizing its petty-cash supply. .Jay Cocks

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