A Game of Rat And Louse

Muriel Spark weaves her 21st work of fiction, Aiding and Abetting (Doubleday; 166 pages; $21), around a matter of fact: the 1974 disappearance of the seventh Earl of Lucan, who was subsequently charged with bludgeoning his children's nanny to death in a botched attempt to murder his estranged wife. Questions about this scandal have echoed in the British press ever since. Was Lord Lucan guilty? Is he still alive? If so, who helped him escape, and who has been aiding and abetting the fugitive's life in hiding ever since?

Cut to the fictional near present. Hildegard Wolf, a successful Paris psychiatrist, finds herself treating not one but two patients who claim to be the notorious Lucan. But she too is in hiding from a criminal past; her real name is Beate Pappenheim, a sham Bavarian stigmatic who, using her menstrual blood to simulate Christ's wounds on the cross, once extracted a small fortune from credulous Roman Catholics before vanishing into a new identity.

Soon enough, both self-alleged Lucans tell Wolf that they know who she really is, or was. These two men, one of whom may actually be the missing earl, are evidently conspiring to blackmail their psychiatrist, and she goes into hiding once again, to plan a counteroffensive.

Given such unsavory protagonists, Aiding and Abetting doesn't generate an abundance of rooting interest in its outcome. But Spark, 83, has lost none of her skill and verve in portraying flamboyantly wicked people behaving according to "a morality devoid of ethics or civil law." Like Evelyn Waugh, she employs her characters' untroubled consciences as an implicit sign of their irredeemable awfulness. And this engaging game of rat and louse concludes with a bit of poetic justice that is ghastly and richly appropriate.