A Slight Case of Murder

REPUTATION FOR A SONG (331 pp.)]--Edward Grierson--Knopf ($3.50).

When the prosecuting counsel opened his case for the Crown in the trial of Rupert Laurence Anderson, aged 18 and charged with murdering his father, he told the jury: "It is of small things that I shall tell, small hatreds, small jealousies, small desires."

Small people too, he might have added. Decent, ineffectual Robert Anderson was no match for his wife Laura when they began squabbling over the children. Laura hated him; she also hated their spiritless daughter Margaret, because she was so much like her father. Thanks to Laura's interventions, Margaret never even got to kiss the cautious clergyman she might have married. Lazy brother Rupert, meantime, whiled away delicious summer nights with a ripe barmaid named Joy. But his mother Laura thought Rupert could do no wrong--not even on the night of Oct. 5, when he picked up a heavy poker and brought it crashing down on Papa Anderson's skull.

In Reputation for a Song, British Novelist Edward Grierson has carpentered a trimly joined plot, with Freudian underpinnings and a legalistic overlay, to describe the ugly events leading up to the fatal night in the little English town and the court battle that followed. Having disposed of the body, mother and son buttress the boy's plea of- self-defense by disposing of the dead man's reputation. Margaret threatens to tell all; but even she is finally persuaded that her brother's neck is worth more than her father's name, remains silent when testimony paints the dead man as a brute and drunkard. Novelist Grierson's feeling: well might the ghost of Robert Anderson weep with Omar Khayyam, "Indeed the Idols I have loved so long / Have . . . sold my Reputation for a Song."

In England, Novelist Grierson, 38, has been somewhat prematurely compared to E. M. Forster. In this book, he invests a good deal of intelligence and technical equipment in a very slight case of mur der, but does not help matters for the reader by his plodding, impersonal style and easily recognizable but one-dimensional British types. His point seems to be that justice can be blind. Nobody will disagree.

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