Crushers and Subgumshoes

By Michael Demarest

In the resort-town whatsit shops, where summer visitors unload old paperbacks, a good used thriller is rarely in stock. Biographies, gothics, sex novels abound. But whodunits tend to linger on in vacation cottages until, in a welter of unglued clues, they spill apart. This summer at least four volumes will be read to shreds by season's end:

Michael Crichton's THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (Knopf; 266 pages; $7.95) happily contributes to the current revival of British imperial style. In Sherlock Holmes reprints, The Great Victorian Collection and innumerable biographies, Victoria Regina rides again. For this intricate mystery, her very nation moves to life. The vowel sounds and alley reeks, the technological detail and social lacunae--all are here, ornamenting a tale based on the celebrated 1850 heist.

Edward Pierce, master criminal, aims to snaffle -L-12,000 in old bullion bound for the British troops in the Crimea. Playing between the parlors of the rich and the Dickensian dens of the criminal underworld, the aristocratic thief outwits crushers (cops), noses (informers) and Establishment nibs to assemble the four keys needed to grab the gold. By subversion, bribery and tricks far dirtier than the king's men ever dreamed of, the ringleader and his scruffy accomplices come within a sniff of the swag, only to meet their greatest obstacle: an obscure law of physics.

Crichton, venturing outside sci-fi (The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man), again proves a skillful researcher and popularizer. Drawing from such scholars as Henry Mayhew, a bygone chronicler of the criminal subculture, he wittily lances the pomposities of 19th century England, when material and moral progress seemed inseparable.

THE BENGALI INHERITANCE (Pantheon; 225 pages; $6.95) is also based on the gold standard. Hong Kong Senior Inspector Richard Chan is a heroic young pro whose district is the last resting place of a 24-karat fortune. The loot has been missing since 1945, when the Fascist collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose perished in an air crash. Bird-dogging the musty trail of the treasure, Detective Chan takes on a slew of Oriental cutthroats, as well as the colonial snobs who disdainfully regard him as a subgumshoe. Ceylonese Author Owen Cela is obviously no stranger to the refractions of cultural prejudice or to the vagaries of modern criminals. His novel is an acute introduction to the social history of that paradoxically outdated and utterly contemporary city, Hong Kong.

J.B. Priestley, 80, whose acerbic novels of British working-class life go back over half a century, sets his SALT IS LEAVING (Harper & Row; 247 pages; $6.95) in contemporary England. The spice of the title is a wordy, forty-fivish general practitioner anxious to pull out of provincial Birkden as soon as he can track down a vanished patient. Noreen Wilkes is certain to die if she goes without treatment for a rare kidney disease. She has been missing for three weeks when Dr. Salt goes to the police convinced that Miss Wilkes has been murdered. Next, the impeccably respectable E. Culworth, bookseller and stationer, also disappears. Salt--his first name is never used--is joined in the countdown by Maggie Culworth, the bookseller's no-nonsense daughter. The opulent mystery, involving a suicide, a murder and a succession of set-tos with Birkden's Mr. Big, incidentally reveals Old Socialist Priestley's sardonic disenchantment with the I'm-All-Right-Jack society.

Britain's Dick Francis was once a champion steeplechase rider; since 1964 he has been booting home thrillers about horse racing. In KNOCKDOWN (Harper & Row; 217 pages; $6.95), his 15th, Francis penetrates the roseate fac,ade of Ascot and Newmarket to examine the seamy, ruthless world of horseflesh peddlers. His laconic hero, Jonah Dereham, an ex-jock turned agent, refuses to play along with a ring of crooked horse traders. A loner, like most of Francis' characters, Dereham learns the hard way that "all's fair in love, war and bloodstock": he is savagely beaten, pitchforked within an inch of his life and has his house set afire. Francis resolves most of Dereham's tribulations--including a boozy brother who lives with him and a spiffy blonde who will not--in a denouement that provides enough excitement for two Grand Nationals.

As these volumes amply demonstrate, the mystery remains a classic summer solace--and something more. For each book stubbornly disputes Edmund Wilson's famous grumble that thriller reading is "a kind of vice that for sheer silliness and minor harmfulness, rates between crossword puzzles and smoking." At its rare and satisfying best, the well-wrought detective story puts its readers in mind of an older critic, Thomas De Quincey, who once ventured a thesis of "Murder as One of the Fine Arts."

Michael Demarest

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