Crime as Punishment

By Timothy Foote

A DRESSING OF DIAMOND by NICOLAS FREELING 252 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Two years ago, Nicolas Freeling committed a rare and shocking crime which might be described as protagonisticide. In Aupres de Ma Blonde, with no advance warning, he killed off his own central character, a laconic Amsterdam detective named Van der Valk, through whose human but gritty sensibility the author had previously filtered a dozen of the best psychological suspense novels written in Europe since the war.

Freeling pleaded extenuating circumstances--his own need for a change of character and scene. Faithful Freeling readers who, since Love in Amsterdam (1963), have stoutly prized Van der Valk even above Simenon's Inspector Maigret, ground their teeth and waited.

Now comes A Dressing of Diamond, the first proof of Freeling's new freedom.

The scene is the new exurbia outside Paris, where a saucy mini-gratte-ciel apartment building full of affluent city commuters not only scrapes the sky but rubs nearby villagers and the demoralized peasantry the wrong way. Henri Castang, Freeling's new sleuth, is a low-key public servant who, like Van der Valk, cites Proust and Dickens without sounding pretentious.

The crime involved is kidnaping, not for ransom but rather as a comeuppance for an old grudge. Colette Delavigne, aged 27, is a judge in the juvenile courts and the pretty offspring of a brilliant haute bourgeois family. Colette is married to Bernard, a rich young executive who sells yogurt but is by her standards a social inferior. When a spiteful villager abducts their eight-year-old daughter as part of an ongoing vendetta against Colette's family, the Delavigne marriage is further strained.

The situation allows Freeling to display a talent for domestic dialogue. In several deft scenes he explores the problem of feminine achievement and male pride in a country where marriage has usually been seen as a grueling lifetime game of mixed doubles.

The book is full of Freeling's virtues. There are secondary characters so swiftly and seductively sketched that they threaten to run off into novels all their own. Still, most Freeling fans may wonder if much is gained by introducing the new hero. A Dressing of Diamond is likely to send them figuratively off to Strasbourg to stone the author's house and shout, "Bring back Van der Valk!" The judgment may be a scrap premature. Freeling is not quite the chameleon poet of crime he thought he was, but he remains a writer worth waiting for.

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