Rakes & Nipcheeses

FALSE COLOURS by Georgeffe Heyer. 317 pages. Dutton. $3.95.

"Marston," the lady inquires of the butler, "has he been getting foxed often?" "Oh, no, ma'am! He has been dipping rather deep, perhaps." Exchanges like this, from the pages of Georgette Heyer's decorous novels, often fox the uninitiated reader too.

But to the vast and steadily growing international legion of Georgette Heyer addicts, everything is as clear as Madeira. She is resorting again to the elegant Regency slang in which she has indefatigably chronicled the goings on of blooded Britons in the age when old King George III was too dotty to rule outright and his son, the Prince Regent, had not yet acceded to the title as George IV. What the butler means, obviously, is that his Lordship, while putting away a lot of the stuff, has been seldom if ever drunk.

Genteel Cult. By knowing more about Regency fops, rakes, routs and blades than anyone else alive, Georgette Heyer has turned what otherwise could be dismissed as a long series of sugary historical romances into a body of work that will probably be consulted by future scholars as the most detailed and accurate portrait of Regency life anywhere. She has also become the center of a genteel reading cult that has made her for years a runaway bestseller in England and now is spreading to the U.S., proliferating vociferously at ladies' luncheons and in lending libraries. But as with the late William Faulkner, you don't buy a book, you buy a world. If it suits you, you settle down forever.

False Colours, therefore, may not be "top of the trees," but it is a fair sample. It is larded with arcane phrases like "tip him a settler" (knock him out), epithets like "nipcheese" (a parsimonious person), verbs like "fadge" (to make sense). Male characters do not dress; they are accoutered, like Achilles, in the armor prescribed by Beau Brummel, who, as every Heyer reader knows, not only taught Englishmen to wash, wear clean linen and conservatively cut clothes, but invented a boot polish with a special magic ingredient--vintage champagne. Its plot is frothy and prolix. Charles Fancot, the second son of now-defunct Lord Denville, comes home to London, after helping his uncle preside at the Congress of Vienna, to find that stormy Twin Brother Evelyn has resolved to get their flighty mother out of debt. As the new earl, Evelyn has an income of 25,000 guineas a year, but he can't touch capital, so where is the poor fellow to turn? Well, to marriage and to an heiress, of course. By the time one twin substitutes for another in the courtship--naturally falling in love with the lady--and Mamma is once again solvent, the reader has come to feel the spell of a slight-prose master whose writing suggests not only Jane Austen and Angela Thirkell but perhaps the Bobbsey Twins as well.

Heyer Learning. No one is sure how Georgette Heyer acquired her knowledge. It is known that in real life she is married to a London lawyer named Richard Rougier, inhabits a stylish Albany apartment stuffed with Regency antiques. But she grants no interviews, does not help promote her books and, in a slender official biography, admits only to having been educated "at various schools." A friend explains, "She's just learned without being academic--a thing we have in England." Serious critics dismiss her writing as nothing but "a jolly good read," except for The Infamous Army, which is regarded as the best novel about the Battle of Waterloo since Thackeray's Vanity Fair. In an age of prurience and pornography, Georgette Heyer's main appeal is in the faultless re-creation of a world of manners and decorum.

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