Notable

NIGHTSHADE

by DEREK MARLOWE 192 pages. Viking. $7.95.

At last, a modern novel more or less about abstinence. Nightshade's protagonist, Edward Lytton, is 40, devoutly Catholic and astonishingly, since he is four years married, a virgin. He does not mind his asexual life; indeed, he is so Victorian that he can barely imagine any other. Alas, his unfulfilled young wife Amy is not resigned to her condition. She indulges in "fantasies of liquid the color of magenta, a pomegranate redness, viscous to the touch, so that one has to lick it dry." Poor Edward is clearly in for trouble.

Most of it occurs in Haiti, where Edward hopes to make them "best friends" again after Amy has an affair with her libertine half sister Blanche. A mysterious stranger appears and reappears. Amy begins to act strange, as if she possesses some important secret. Edward begins to spot possible hints of new infidelity everywhere--in a faint whiff of cigarette smoke, a footprint, a random passage from a book.

The prose crackles with innuendo as the plot quickly becomes as complicated as Edward's mind--and as haunted by ghosts and obsessions. British Author Derek Marlowe, best known for A Dandy in Aspic, pits Lytton's prim England against sensual Haiti, Catholicism against voodooism, the terrors of a feverish imagination against the banality of a tourist's experience. What starts out as a thin, sinister tale ends as a psychological chiller finely wrought for any season.

KING AND JOKER

by PETER DICKINSON 222 pages. Pantheon. $6.95.

The works of British Mystery Writer Peter Dickinson are like caviar--an acquired taste that can easily lead to addiction. Dickinson, an ex-editor of Punch, does not make much of the process of detection, nor does he specialize in suspense. Instead, he neatly packs his books with such old-fashioned virtues as mood, character and research. The Poison Oracle (1974) is a good example. Set in an imaginary Arab kingdom, it delves into cultural anthropology (desert v. marsh Arabs) as well as fashionable psycholinguistics (in this case, how man communicates with chimpanzee). There is a murder, to be sure, whose only witness naturally turns out to be, yes, a talkative chimpanzee.

In King and Joker, Dickinson's subject is the British royal family. Not the actual one, but another that the author invents, complete with idiosyncratic antecedents going back to Queen Victoria. King Victor II, a frustrated M.D., is on the throne. Married to Isabella of Spain, father of Prince Albert and Princess Louise, he lives in Buckingham Palace, where a practical joker is at work. The jokes seem harmless at first: a toad is placed on a covered plate for the King's breakfast (when the butler sees it, he faints). Then the jokes get nastier, ending in two murders.

These goings-on are seen through the eyes of Princess Louise, a beguiling lass of 13 who does not like what she calls the "business of princessing." As she tries to discover the joker's identity, she learns a good deal about herself and her family. They have kept many secrets --human flaws and royal affairs alike --from the public. Dickinson's easygoing wit pervades the book. When Princess Louise is shocked to learn that the original go-between who arranged her father's marriage was a nun, the King replies: "She's a very good woman with a real gift for intrigue. If they'd any sense they'd make her a cardinal."

PAPA: A PERSONAL MEMOIR

by GREGORY H. HEMINGWAY, M.D. 119 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $7.50.

This bestselling memoir by Ernest Hemingway's youngest son Gregory is a bitter jumble of unsorted resentments and anguished love. It is hard to know how much weight to give these recollections because the author gives little glimpse of his own adult self. His father's four marriages were "emotional catastrophes"; his mother Pauline (Ernest's second wife) ignored him when he was small. But who says so? A steady, reasonable man? An injustice collector? One of life's unconsolables?

"In his youth," writes this wounded son, "my father was not a bully, a sick bore, or a professional celebrity ... the man I remembered was kind, gentle, elemental in his vastness, tormented beyond endurance." It is a strange defense that the younger Hemingway makes, more desperate even than his father's messy last years seem to warrant. Of course it is hard to see a father grow old and fat and futile, and Gregory Hemingway's father, during the 1930s when the boy was little, had been an authentic hero. He was handsome, strong, renowned as a writer. He was a loving companion who taught Gregory to be a champion wing shot and a powerful protector who once showed great courage in rescuing the boy from sharks. By the time Gregory was old enough to test his own manhood against the patriarch (he became a relentless hunter and admits with jocular bad taste to some fairly specific Oedipal whims concerning his father's last two wives), Ernest had become far too vulnerable. Now, with the father-son contest unresolved, the father needed protecting. The son felt confused and bitter: come back, Daddy, and fight like a man!

Self-Pity. Gregory writes of Hemingway's funeral that "hundreds of telegrams of condolence came in from all over the world, but only a small number of people actually showed up. There weren't too many really good friends left." This is vicarious self-pity; the funeral was in Ketchum, Idaho, one of the most isolated spots on the continent, and a willingness to travel there to hear words spoken over a dead man is a poor test of friendship. The painful, touching book in which this churlishness is expressed proves, as other writings have proved, that Hemingway is one of those artists not well served by biography. Better to read A Farewell to Arms again.

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