A Murder Gallery

THE SECRET STREAM (224 pp.)--Marcel Aymee--Harper ($2.75).

Like most good French wines, French Novelist Marcel Aymee travels well. Although French custodians of palms and prizes rate him as a deuxieeme cru--a secondary growth--he has been highly praised in the U.S. as one of the best products of his country. The reason for the difference in taste probably is that Satirist Ayme's dry caricatures hit the American palate as typically Gallic. Such novels as The Barkeep of Blemont and The Miraculous Barber have been so successful here that his U.S. publishers have now dug out one that is 18 years old. It turns on a murder.

For most novelists, murder is a springboard for mystery, terror or tragedy. For Marcel Aymee, it is an occasion for comedy. Satirist Aymee is less interested in the gruesome murder that is the source of The Secret Stream than in the characters of the French provincials who live along its banks. The novel is full of double exposures--images of provincial types as they appear to be and, superimposed, images of them as they presumably are.

The gallery of portraits includes the affable murderer, a respected but degenerate lawyer, who kills and mutilates his 19-year-old maidservant; the murder suspect, an apelike beast, who is really as engaging as he is simple, although he did try to rape, of all people, the madam of the establishment at No. 15, Street of the Little Nuns; the police sergeant, who acts the cop but cannot understand why he has devoted 30 years of unflagging vigilance to maintaining order; the doctor, who thinks love is the source of everything but hates an entire family because the father seduced one of his cousins, then told the girl's accusing parents that "a person sitting on an ant-heap is going a bit far when they pretend to know which particular ant has bitten them"; the mayor, an "upholder of correct living," who is too honest to send an innocent man to the guillotine "without some preliminary qualms of conscience"; the honest masses, who virtually cheer a vile crime because they think the criminal is one of them and because "a crime which outraged the peo ple in good society was not deserving of their protest." The thread of this dry, dispassionate satire hangs on the question: Will the murderer be caught? He is, but that hardly matters. What does matter is Novelist Aymee's picture of provincial life. It is the prototype of a stock cliche of French humor, and has begun to yellow a bit with age. Although expertly composed and amusing in spots, it is trivial and slightly out of focus.

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