STIRRING TALES OF MYSTERY AND HISTORY

Author: By Robin W. Winks

Date: SUNDAY, March 29, 1998

Page: G2

Section: Books

Pears's Oxford is post-Elizabethan, indeed post-Commonwealth: Charles II has just been restored to the throne. England is rife with conspiracy theories, with accusations about political, religious, and sexual misconduct. The countryside has been ravaged by war, and the English hardly know how miserable they are or should be in their damp, muddy country. The monarchy is insecure, striving for stability. New ideas from the Continent are discussed at high table in the university city. An Oxford don is murdered, and Pears begins his chase.

The novel is constructed around four narratives, each person testifying to a version of the truth, each misleading the reader. Real figures crowd the novel, taken directly from the historical record. We see the events through the words of a Venetian visitor alert to the oddities of the English; a student obsessed with clearing his father's name of the accusation of treason; a mathematician and pre-Bletchley code-breaker who is clearly not to be trusted; and a compassionate, observant historian who has the strengths and the weaknesses of his discipline. Long (700 pages), rich in nuance, requiring much of the reader, this novel at last makes a good name for the historical mystery, a body of fiction that I have, to this moment, thoroughly disliked. Pears, an art historian by training, has an acute eye; holding an Oxford doctorate himself, he sees university life plain. And Restoration England comes alive in this book, which is surely destined to enjoy the success accorded Umberto Eco's ``The Name of the Rose.''

Any other mystery seems fairly thin set against Pears's work, but there are plenty of entertaining books out there that do not require the same attention as ``Fingerpost.'' Peter Lovesey's series of quasi-procedurals set in Bath, and featuring Peter Diamond, head of the murder squad, present an England in moral confusion, and ``Upon a Dark Night'' (Mysteries Press, $23) draws the reader out of the hypnotic 17th century into the world of modern murder. An elderly farmer appears to have killed himself; a young woman appears to have fallen from a roof; an amnesiac is released by a hospital into a halfway house. These seemingly distinct occurrences are, in the end, shown to be closely related in a classic of British understated suspense. Lovesey began his writing career with Sergeant Cribb, Victorian policeman; wrote a classic historical mystery, ``The False Inspector Dew,'' set in 1921; and turned King Edward VII (``Bertie'') into a detective before creating Diamond. He is equally good working in past or present, and never forgets how one influences the other -- as here, where the real cause of the murders, as they prove to be, is buried in ancient Mercian times.

Nothing could jolt one into the intense present more quickly than moving from Pears and Lovesey to Laurence Shames. I have taken only mild pleasure from Shames's four previous books, of which ``Virgin Heat'' was the most intriguing, but his new Key West-based ``Mangrove Squeeze'' (Hyperion, $22.95) has won me over completely. Dust-jacket quotations invariably put Shames in company with Carl Hiassen and Elmore Leonard, and there are certainly similarities, but Shames has his own voice -- not so persistently nasty as that of Hiassen (who in the end seems to find every character a figure of fun, every human motivation questionable), and not so concerned with the lowlifes of the sun district as Leonard's. In ``Mangrove Squeeze,'' Shames combines a bittersweet love story with acute observations about old age, American capitalism, and journalism as he introduces an obtuse, murderous, utterly amoral Russian mafia to the gay scene on Duval Street. Shames has compassion for even his most despicable characters, which is surely rare these days.

Thomas William Simpson has no compassion for anyone in ``The Caretaker'' (Bantam, $22.95). No one is likable. A salesman is inveigled into an offer he cannot resist, which involves moving himself and his family into a handsome mansion on Long Island and turning himself into the world's best salesman. A caretaker is provided with the property. The caretaker soon proves to be a figure of evil, insinuating himself in the salesman's life in insidious ways. Distrust is on every side. The novel goes on too long, but along the way it rises to levels of the paranoid generally found only in the daily press. One longs for Pears's Oxford of three centuries ago.