He Dunit

By Patricia Blake

COLD HEAVEN by Brian Moore Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 265 pages; $14.95

A native of Belfast, Brian Moore has a special talent for pungent portraiture of those Irish men and women who are, as James Joyce put it, "outcast from life's feast": desperate spinsters, failed priests, drunken poets--and expatriates, like Moore himself. But as the distance between Moore and his homeland widened, he produced, under the pseudonyms Michael Bryan and Bernard Marrow, some lamentable whodunits. By way of apology he once explained: "I tried to write as an American."

Moore, 62, is still trying to write as an American. Cold Heaven, his 13th novel, traverses a terrain of the spirit as far removed from Belfast as the beach house in Malibu, Calif., where he now resides. His main characters are a California couple vacationing on the French Riviera. After a boating accident, the husband, a self-centered young physician named Alex Davenport, is taken to a local hospital with head injuries; a team of French physicians pronounces him dead. His widow Marie suspects foul play. "Did they kill him . . . because of what I didn't do?" she muses mysteriously. The phrase has a paranoid cast, as does her fear of the open sky. A frequent fantasy: "Guns were leveled from that blue brightness, following her every step."

Before Alex can be properly cremated, he rises miraculously from the dead and dons a surgical scrub suit from the Nice morgue. He retrieves his clothes, passport and traveler's checks from his hotel room, and takes off for California, with the baffled Marie in pursuit. She locates her still groggy spouse in a Carmel motel. He is taking his pulse in wonderment; his heart, he notes, has a tendency to stop. Indeed, he drops dead from time to time, then comes to life. Marie now vows to do the mysterious thing she failed to do before. That, she says, is the only way she can put a stop to Alex's repeated deaths.

Up to this point, Moore has charted a persuasive, even gripping tale. Then comes a narrative twist that is doubtless meant to transform a mystery story into serious fiction, if not high art. But Moore's tricky turn leads to a conclusion of ineffable silliness, involving the improbable apparition of the Virgin Mary in California. It gives nothing essential in the plot away to disclose that in this whodunit the perpetrator is God.

The good news about Moore's novel is that it contains a splendid portrait of a priest, whose line of talk demonstrates that the author still has an infallible ear for the speech of the clerics who educated him back in Belfast. The good father in Cold Heaven serves to redeem Moore's cast of otherwise lackluster characters. His name is Monsignor Cassidy. Bless him, he is the only Irishman in the lot.

-- By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.