The Best off British Crime

By Michael Demarest

A cut-rate summer ticket to mystery, mayhem and murder

With deference to Freddie Laker's no-frills transatlantic fares, an all-thrills package tour of England can be had for only $49.70 this summer. The round-trip price includes visits to uncharted villages from Devonshire to Derbyshire, scenes of London rarely glimpsed by the natives, a vintage assemblage of odds and sods and intellects, and carte blanche to the last remaining pubs that purvey strong ale, stalwart beef and susceptible barmaids. Best of all, you don't have to leave an American beach to get there; the no-wait, wingless voyage can be booked at a bookstore. The package consists of six new novels of mystery, crime and suspense by English authors. Each proves again that in the land of 4 o'clock oolong and midnight gore, of crumpets, trumpets and strumpets, there is still time for elegant talk, sprightly characters and plots as convoluted as the Hampton

Court maze. The itinerary is as varied as the topography of the tight little island:

The Glimpses of the Moon by Edmund Crispin (Walker; 287 pages; $8.95). In one of Crispin's earlier books, a mystery novelist confides: "Our plots are necessarily improbable, but I believe in making sure that they are not impossible." With Glimpses, his first detective story in a quarter-century, Crispin re-establishes his own flair for turning the unlikely into the inevitable. A grisly succession of murders, decapitations and other severances in a Devon village involves the rector, a retired major, a composer, a not-too-plodding constable, two detectives, two nymphomaniacs, sundry pig farmers, most of Fleet Street, a blackmailer, a local ancient --and Gervase Fen, an urbane Oxford don and literary critic who, as in previous Crispin novels, discreetly provides the ratiocination that puts all the bods and motives together again. Crispin, 57, may be forgiven for his long vacation from mayhem. In the real world, he maintains an identity as Composer R. Bruce Montgomery, the man who has settled the scores for dozens of British movies. As Crispin, he spikes the suspense with some hilarious rustic intermezzos worthy of Wodehouse. Glimpses should win the protean author the wide American audience that, for improbable reasons, he has never achieved.

The Molehill File by Michael Kenyan (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; 192 pages; $7.95). There's no time for tea in this sardonic unraveling of Establishmentarian rottenness. The sleuth is doughty Detective-Inspector Henry Peckover, a passable published poet who can no more aspirate his aitches than preserve his skull from duggery. Relegated by Scotland Yard to a dead-end fraud investigation, he links the murder of a May fair tart to a web of political, financial and sexual hanky-panky that encompasses a titled M.P., a police chief superintendent who turns drag queen by night, Middlesex pols and proles, bird hunters of all varieties and an Arab sheik bent on making the green and pheasant land an adjunct of Riyadh. Molehill is the sixth novel by Oxonian Kenyon, 47, and the first to feature the engaging 'Enry Peckover, whose career can only go up.

Spence and the Holiday Murders by Michael Allen (Walker; 173 pages; $7.95). Christmas is coming, geese are getting fat, but not for the poor coppers who have only three days to solve a murder if their pie is to be mince, not humble. The Dec. 22 victim is rich, young, handsome Roger Parnell. The man who has everything has faults too. Parnell, as it turns out, is an utter bounder: zoom-lens voyeur, seducer of schoolgirls, possible blackmailer and shady business entrepreneur. There are, in point of fact, almost as many reasons to knock off Rog as there are suspects in his glossy, Sussexy village; they include a huffy M.P., some rather mannish schoolmarms, a vengeful handyman and others with sound motives to bury the rake. The pieces come together just in time for Detective-Superintendent Ben Spence, 38, to carve the goose chez lui. Cambridge-educated Michael Allen, 39, has to learn to relax a bit to become a true-blue murder master, but his Inspector Spence is a very good bet to return to the scene of the crime.

Some Run Crooked by John Buxton Hilton (St. Martin's; 192 pages; $7.95). Any place called the Peculiar Court of Peak Forest rates a detour for the tourist. It is also a three-star arena for murder most foul. The 300-year-old institution, which exists to this day in the dour reaches of northwest Derbyshire, is a kind of Gretna Green where eloping couples can receive a churchly marriage, no questions asked. Dispatched to the neighborhood to ask a lot of questions about an apparently meaningless homicide, Inspector Kenworthy of the Yard finds that he has two other unsolved killings to contend with. Each is worthy of a book in itself. One bride-in-waiting was slain at Peak Low in 1758, another in 1940, and both have strong mythic and circumstantial links to the recent doing-in of young Julie Wimpole. There are no jollies here at the pub. The locals are a closemouthed, close-knit lot, suspicious of outsiders for good reasons ancient and modern. The story turns on the kind of inbred diabolism on which Shirley Jackson based The Lottery. Author John Buxton Hilton, 57, a Derbyshire man with seven previous suspense novels to his credit, has a somewhat unattractive deus ex mackintosh in Inspector Kenworthy. But Hilton knows the people and the terrain, and his story is as eerie as a North Country fog, and almost as satisfyingly impenetrable.

The Shallow Grave by Jack S. Scott (Harper & Row; 188 pages; $7.95). In an idyllic little village where nothing much has happened since the Normans passed through, Ellie Beavis, an inoffensive spinster schoolteacher, turns up dead--coshed and strangled--and three months pregnant. Her discovery by the local derelict, who bears the resounding name of Henry St. Clare Rossiter, brings an irascible superintendent, a raunchy inspector and a husky detective sergeant to the scene. The cogitating coppers have their headquarters at the White Swan pub, whose Mae Westerly landlady serves them food and drink as distracting as the sexual fantasies she stirs. For all their grogging and slogging, the coppers get nowhere, although it seems as if the vicar, the school headmistress and the lordly tramp know considerably more about Ellie than they will admit. Then a -L-5 note leads to a double-whammy denouement. Jack Scott, 53, whose notable previous mystery was The Bastard's Name Was Bristow, stylishly evokes the mores, quirky souls and earthy argot of rural England. The grave is shallow, but the plot runs deep.

Newsdeath by Ray Connolly (Atheneum; 250 pages; $8.95). Fleet Street and Scotland Yard, antipodes of English energy, collide and coalesce in Newsdeath. The unnerving center of the story is an outfit called PUMA, which kills and kidnaps ad nauseam with the mindless goal of waging war on the mass media in order, it says, to liberate the oppressed masses. What might have been a silly or tiresome plot is transformed by Author Ray Connolly into a taut and stylish story well marinated in the lore of newspaper city rooms and the Yard. Its antihero, John Huckleston, a.k.a. Huckle, stumbles ahead of the coppers in tracking down the terrorist outfit that has London in a state of siege. Aided by his colleague and best pal, Winston Collins, a driven black reporter, Huckle unwittingly commits the ultimate journalistic crime of getting his own mug on Page One day after day. Of course he winds up stripping PUMA to its nasty bones. Connolly, 37, a Fleet Street veteran, is a storyteller in the hardboiled, sexy Los Angeles tradition, with saving Anglo graces. Each of his dozen or so major characters is portrayed with insight and imagination, and the seamier side of London -- and two of its two oldest professions -- is limned with Hogarthian skill.

Huckle and Winston should be a long-run team.

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