(4 of 4)
Of the Boston-area writers, William G. Tapply seems to grow the most from book to book. The Vulgar Boatman (Scribner's; 226 pages; $14.95) almost leaps from the headlines: a charismatic Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate is hit by a family scandal that seems to result from careful orchestration of the media. Complicating the plot are sexual twists, sadistic murders and a high school-based drug ring that exploits the gap in computer awareness between young people and most of their elders. The infectious spread of the drug culture into comfortable suburbs and small towns is nothing new in either fact or fiction, but Tapply treats it with affecting indignation. The candidate's teenage son, in whom the plots connect, is particularly touching and believable.
Hardly anyone writes anymore in the Golden Age vein of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and other proponents of the thinking-machine detective and the sort of plot one could dissect strictly through armchair ratiocination. But many readers and nearly all mystery writers were nurtured on such stuff, so every now and then a master of the more modern, psychological style will feel prompted to an affectionate pastiche. H.R.F. Keating's The Body in the Billiard Room (Viking; 247 pages; $15.95) transplants his sedulous, canny but congenitally modest Bombay detective Ganesh Ghote to a decaying but pretentious club in Ootacamund, an erstwhile hill station still redolent of the raj. There a dotty old official prattles on about the style of detection he has encountered in books, and expects Ghote to strut like Hercule Poirot. The obligatory murder has in fact taken place in the socially appropriate billiard room; the situation amounts to a classic locked-room puzzle; the suspects are all elite.
Keating superbly manages the balance between a send-up of the Golden Age and a revival of it. But more powerful are the scenes in which Ghote travels outside the club and back into the real India of poverty, caste conflict and never Westernized religion and custom. The story has suspense, illicit sex, danger and ample comic relief. Perhaps the best measure of Keating's achievement is that this book makes mystery a single genre again: it is hard to imagine a fan, of whatever tastes, who will not greet it with delight.