FICTIONAL SLEUTH WHO FITS THE BILL

Mystery writers need sleuths the way strippers need gimmicks. Historically, the range has been from an early-day figure known as The Thinking Machine to Joseph Hansen’s gay insurance adjuster Dave Brandstetter. Along the way there have been languid aristocrats, spinsters, an orchid fancier and cops and bloodshot private eyes by the gross.

For me, the most engaging new murder-solver in recent years has been Simon Brett’s Charles Paris, a middle-aged, largely unsuccessful London actor who fuels himself on excesses of Bell’s Scotch, snarls at his agent, cajoles the ex-wife he still loves and keeps stumbling over bodies in every medium he touches: radio, provincial rep, a television series, an out-of-town tryout.

In his next outing, due this fall here in England, Paris will be involved in a TV quiz show in a book to be called “Dead Giveaway,” a title that suggests what is true: The Paris mysteries are more funny than scarifying. Their rewards are less in the clever plotting than in the wicked accuracy with which Brett depicts Charles and his various environs.

Brett knows man and milieu firsthand, having been a producer of light entertainment for radio and television for 18 years. Producing adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers for BBC radio in 1974, he found that dissecting her work with the scriptwriter took some of the mystery out of mysteries and “I became less daunted by the idea of doing it,” he says.

Brett had been working with middle-aged actors for years and “Charles Paris sprang fully armed from that experience.” By now, Paris has fumbled his way through 10 books--”Dead Giveaway” will be the 11th--never getting a really good part or a good review. In one of the books he was reduced to playing a corpse and almost became one.

“People keep saying why don’t I let Charles and Frances get back together, or let Charles have a success. What? And have the whole series fall apart? Impossible!”

Brett, cheerful and open-faced, seems in his restless productivity more mid-Atlantic than British. You have the feeling he dashes off two treatments and half a book on the train ride in from West Sussex where he lives.

He still writes for radio and television, although he no longer produces. He has done several nonfiction books, including “The Faber Book of Parodies” and “The Child-Owners Handbook.” (He and his wife have three children.)

Last year he wrote and directed a midnight romp at the Chichester Summer Festival called “Chopped Hamlet,” a parody provoked by his anthology. This year he is doing a comparable romp with a ghost theme.

Brett wrote his first novel at 16 (“a tortured novel of adolescence,” he says), the first of four novels he wrote, and had rejected, before he got around to Charles Paris. He now agrees that the novels were unpublishable, but the value of writing them is that “you find out early that you can go the distance.”

He wrote and performed in revue sketches at Oxford and was president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Thence into radio, where he did everything from quizzes to magazine format shows, including several series (one of which he still writes) with writer-performer Frank Muir. Even now, radio runs a close second to book-writing among his pleasures.

“It’s so simple and so flexible,” Brett says. “None of those inevitable changes and frustrations that go with television. TV made massive inroads on radio, of course, but it’s stabilized now. Radio is still originating six or eight new plays here every week, and nothing challenges radio yet for serious talk.”

Brett’s most recent book, “Dead Romantic,” is a non-Paris psychological thriller built around a tour-de-force trick of plotting involving a lovesick teen-ager and a pair of love-obsessed adults on collision course. It is his second non-Paris book--the first, “A Shock to the System,” also a murderous thriller told with considerable wit, was very well reviewed.

The mystery, Brett thinks, has come into a new day. “All the tricks have been discovered,” he says, although his new book might argue not quite all. “The clockwork, timetable mystery no longer works the way it did. Agatha Christie’s plots were marvelous, and although she wrote three-dimensional characters at first, she moved away from them deliberately. She made them flatter, stick figures nearly, which did make the books universally readable.”

Now the well-plotted vein is exhausted and the genre is opening out. Readers are demanding, or at least getting, more authenticity, a stronger taste of social history. “I’ve found a wonderful way of writing about my own experience,” Brett says.

Looking at the new dimensions, “You think of the well-researched backgrounds in Dick Francis, the morbid psychology in Ruth Rendell, the quality of the writing and the psychological insights of P. D. James. They’re all honing in on what they can do with the form. After the first couple of Parises, I said what am I doing that nobody else is? The answer was the theater, and humor. I’m very conscious of it now. What I haven’t experienced myself by way of backgrounds I research very thoroughly.”

Brett finds a great deal of vitality in the crime novel, for an interesting reason: “It reflects the difficulty of getting a first novel published. Writers see it as a platform for later work.”

The success of Charles Paris platformed Brett’s leap, as he puts it, “from a secure and pensionable job into 10 years of vagabondage,” the anxieties of the free-lance life now a good deal less anxious than it was for him. Dell is reissuing all the Paris novels in the United States in a uniform edition, one a month, next year.

There are only the most minor of worries. “I’ve been aging Charles a year for each book. But if he gets into his 60s he’ll be much harder to cast. I’m going to have to start fudging a bit, to keep him in his 50s--a good age for an actor.” Curiously, Brett has no idea what Charles Paris looks like. “I can always see all my other characters, but never Charles. Someone at one of the publishers wrote in the jacket copy that he was paunchy, and I suppose he may be. I couldn’t say. But I don’t think readers pay much heed to the descriptive passages anyway; they form their own images.

“Just as well. I don’t want to typecast him.”