Club Pro at Work

By T.E.Kalem

THE RIVERSIDE VILLAS MURDER

by KINGSLEY AMIS 234 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

$6.95.

Kingsley Amis has some of the suaver qualities of a clubroom raconteur. His stories seem to be told over brandy and cigars. But they are not retellings after the fashion of the club bore. He assumes the company of his peers, those upon whom a certain amount of wit, irony and the play of a fanciful intelligence will not be totally lost.

By making the hero of this detective story a 14-year-old boy, Amis cleverly combines, in mild parody, two ultra-British literary forms--the mystery thriller with the boyhood adventure yarn. Peter Furneaux is an appealing adolescent. He is feverishly curious about sex, his own not included. He likes to stage mock military flight maneuvers with a model plane that his World War I Royal Flying Corps father naturally refers to as "an aeroplane." Mute rapture petrifies Peter before the recordings of Geraldo and his Gaucho Tango orchestra (the time is the early 1930s). Yet these are peripheral aspects of his personality. Peter's inner man is grownup. He is vulnerable, yet not weak; discerning, yet not censorious; observant, yet not detached.

Then Mr. Inman, a neighbor, staggers across the threshold soaking wet and bleeding from the head, mutters a few incomprehensible words and pitches over dead on the sitting-room car pet. Enter the supersleuth, Colonel Manton. Curt, cerebral, glacial, sardonic, Manton is a descendant of Sherlock Holmes with a menacing whiff of Dr. Moriarty. Omniscient as God, Manton insists only that the case and the possible culprits not be dull. It isn't, and they aren't. Virtually all the suspects could have motives, and virtually all have pretty good alibis.

With Peter's help, Colonel Manton solves the crime. While Manton schools Peter as to the elusive nature of evil, an "older" woman in her 20s discreetly but thoroughly initiates him into the tangible rites of sex. If Kingsley Amis means to imply that both experiences are coeval, he does not dampen the clubroom spirit by actually saying so.

sbT.E.Kalem

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