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The mystery is a bit formulaic: after several people display powerful motives to kill him, an eminent attorney collapses of an apparent heart attack. A canny elder discovers that the death was murder by poison, then proves that the killing is linked to a point of law. The villain is dragged in from relative obscurity near the end, and the summing-up could be briefer. But the characters are portrayed with wickedly informed satire, and by the rueful conclusion, Murphy has exhibited more than enough potential to do for the legal world what the tongue-in-cheek Emma Lathen mysteries have done to demystify investment banking.
Bryan Forbes, 59, is something of a ringer among amateurs: he has written several other books, including an autobiography. But he is better known for a nearly 40-year film career as a scenarist (Seance on a Wet Afternoon), actor (The League of Gentlemen) and director (The Wrong Box). Unlike many writers who are savvy about movies, Forbes does not produce sketchy treatments, prepackaged for adaptation; each of his works is carefully and densely detailed.
Outwardly, The Endless Game (Random House; 309 pages; $17.95) is about a retired intelligence agent's lone, outlaw struggle to determine why someone murdered a prematurely senile woman who once was his colleague and lover. As in countless British espionage novels during the past few decades, the plot derives from the betrayal of Britain by Master Spy Kim Philby and his fellow moles for the Soviets. What distinguishes Forbes' book is his poignant linking of those defections to what he sees as his country's pervasive moral and material decay: "(He) wondered how anybody worth anything could continue to live in England. Every small town he drove through had the same faceless High Street: betting shops, uninviting pubs, takeaway Chinese restaurants, the pavements scarred with refuse spilling from plastic bags, as if the only growth industries left were those propagating ugliness and sloth. It seemed that the England he had once known had deliberately effaced itself."
Two Thyrdes (St. Martin's Press; 292 pages; $15.95) is about British moral rot of another sort, the ambition and reaction that caused a relative handful of mostly privileged young people to join fascist movements and endorse Hitler and the Nazis. Because such infiltration no longer threatens Britain's independence, the novel lacks The Endless Game's aura of larger significance. But it offers two ingeniously interwoven plots--twin attempts to discredit a father and son, 35 years apart. To understand what is happening to him, the son must solve a puzzle that baffled his father, who died in combat before his heir was born. Author Bertie Denham, 58, who has written one previous mystery (The Man Who Lost His Shadow), creates pungent characters and evokes subtle parallels between the superficially different Britains of father and son. The novel's special pleasure is its setting in the House of Lords, a political institution that has rarely been explored in modern fiction. Denham is in fact Lord Denham, a hereditary peer (one of his titles was created in 1660) and the Tory Whip. He writes with shrewd and skewering knowledge of the mores of his moss-bound haunts but loyally sees to it that Laborites come in for a full share of the attack.