Don Vivant

By Michael Demarest

A TREASURY ALARM by Jocelyn Davey Walker; 229 pages; $9.95

Ambrose Usher sniffs and swirls a mystery as he would a vintage claret from the cellars of his Oxford college. A philosophy don vivant who is summoned from time to time to put down wickedness on behalf of Her Majesty's government, he is the most erudite amateur detective in current fiction.

In A Treasury Alarm, Jocelyn Davey's fifth Usher novel, Ambrose is in the exotic city of Boston to deliver a series of lectures at nearby Harvard. The Treasury--"the innerest of inner circles" --asks him to look over an improper Bostonian named George Fletcher, who is busily gobbling up key British companies, possibly for the Soviets. Usher had known and much disliked the conglomerator in his days as an economic attache to the British embassy in Washington (A Capitol Offense). He had also known and much liked Fletcher's wacky, lovely wife Gloria, who died driving her Jag too fast. In fairly short order, given his necessity to invoke Goethe, Swinburne, Auden, the Old Testament, Shakespeare, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, The Barber of Seville, Beethoven, Berenson, Vasari and other fonts of circumstantial wisdom, Usher stumbles into a morass of rot in Mass. As friends keep telling him, "Things don't happen to you: you happen to things."

One happenstance is Usher's discovery that Gloria Fletcher had in fact been killed by her tycoon husband. The don also finds out that Fletcher is a front man for John P. Harrigan, godfather of Boston's Irish Mafia, whose laundered money is being used for suspicious purchases abroad. Through the delectable Alyss Summers, an art historian, Usher learns that Harrigan has stolen a Donatello statue of St. John the Baptist, as well as a relic of the saint, from a church in Siena. Between lectures Usher gets involved in a gang war, a stratagem to rescue the Donatello, attempts on his life and gory efforts to derail Harrigan's shenanigans. He is assisted by an American pop economist, a rumbustious Boston newspaper editor, a skirt-chasing Turkish prof, a Swinburne-spouting I.R.A. turncoat, a high-level Treasury official with the unlikely name of Sir Olaf McConnochie -- and the admirable Alyss. Though Davey's novels tend to be more whosaidits than whodunits, Treasury offers alarums and excursions aplenty.

Jocelyn Davey is the nom de plume of Chaim ("Rab") Raphael, who has been an Oxford don, a Foreign Office functionary and spokesman for the Treasury, and is as volubly at home in the fleshpots of North America as he is among the ar cane outer reaches of literature, music and art. It is no secret that Ambrose Usher is modeled on Sir Isaiah Berlin, the high-wattage Oxford intellectual, government adviser and nonstop conversationalist. Sir Isaiah is 71. The ebullient Ambrose, of course, has the fictional hero's privilege of suspended birthdays. Or else cloak and mortarboard are more potent rejuvenators than powdered rhino horn. Only Alyss knows.

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