Drawing-Room Spider

THE HOUSE OF GAIR (251 pp.) -Eric Linklafer -Harcourf, Brace ($3.50).

The moor -English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish -is a scarred old playing field of English letters. It shows up again in Eric Linklater's entertaining new novel, The House of Gair, but only as a chilly device to drive the characters indoors. Indoors means, of course, the one and only house on the moor, with its hint of doomsday mysteries. But the real specialty of The House of Gair is light comedy, not heavy breathing.

Stranded far from town, Stephen Coryat, a writer, accepts a gracious offer to spend the night at the House of Gair, a thrifty Scottish version of Manderley, of Rebecca fame. His host turns out to be an Edwardian dandy of 77 named Hazeldon Crome, who had himself written a novel in the '90s called A Quiet Day in Old Cockaigne. Crome charms Stephen completely with his milk & whisky pick-me-ups, his billiard game, and his nostalgic reveries on the days of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.

Stephen leaves Gair, but he cannot shake off a gnawing question. Why, he asks Crome on a second visit, did he stop writing after the critical success of Cockaigne? Nothing of the sort, confides Crome; he merely stopped publishing.

In confessional scatterbursts, the old scoundrel tells all. Nosing out some little-known scandal about-some well-known man, Crome would disguise it thinly in two or three chapters of a projected second novel, submit it to the victim through a go-between, and cheerfully agree to suppress it for a price. After World War I, Blackmailer Crome ruefully relates, the British upper classes lost their manners as well as their money, and his brand of crime no longer paid.

Resourceful Crome found new sheep to fleece. He rounded up a stable of picture forgers ("In Hollywood, for example, there has been a quite extraordinary demand for pictures by ... Matisse and Utrillo"). His misdeeds, he assures Stephen, will be forgiven, just like Cellini's, when posterity reads the autobiographical masterpiece he is writing.

All the while Crome has been spinning a web around Stephen and his upcoming inheritance. Before the fly outwits the spider, drawing-room comedy gives way to drugstore melodrama, and no one is left to shed a tear for Hazeldon Crome except readers who cherish a well-turned rogue.

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