TO BARNARD, SUCCESS IS NO MYSTERY

“Ten years ago,” Robert Barnard was saying, “I suppose it was all Tolkien. Ten years from now it may be all Westerns. Just now--touch wood--it does seem to be mysteries.”

Mysteries have never been cold, despite assaults from Edmund Wilson and other purist critics. But they do appear to be hot now, as both fired by and reflected by the popularity of “Murder, She Wrote” and the several “Mystery” series on television, the P. D. James “Shroud for a Nightingale” most recently. James’ massive new mystery, “A Taste for Death,” is a full selection of the Book of the Month Club, which picks with a bifocal gaze that perceives both excellence and marketplace potential.

Barnard, a round-faced, ruddy and cheerful Englishman, used to say that he was the world’s northernmost mystery writer. He taught English at the University of Tromso, which is well above the Arctic Circle in Norway. One of his earliest mysteries, “Death in a Cold Climate,” was written and set there. He is no longer the northernmost, but has become one of the very best mystery writers in any direction.

His first mystery, “Death of an Old Goat,” came out of what you could call an antipodean experience, teaching, as he did for five years, at the University of New England in Australia. Barnard was particularly pleased with “Old Goat.” The solution is not disclosed until the very last sentence. “Margaret Millar, whom I admire tremendously, has done that. I was very proud of myself.”

Barnard and his wife, Louise, a librarian he met and married in Australia, now live in Leeds. After years of both teaching and writing, he is able to give full time to the writing, thanks to the eagerness with which Americans buy mysteries.

“In England they do still tend to read library copies. In the United States, you buy paperbacks, I’m grateful to say. I sell immensely better here. I should think something between two-thirds and three-fourths of my income arises in America. Most of us who write mysteries couldn’t do it full-time without the American market.”

The Barnards were in the United States to attend the Bouchercon Mystery Convention in Baltimore and to do some visitations in aid of his new mystery, “Bodies,” (Scribner’s, $13.95) in which murder most foul takes place in a Soho loft where body-building magazines are published by day and porn films made at night.

“It was nice to meet people who say they’ve read every word you’ve written. I even met some who collect every edition of the books. Extraordinary!”

Like all of Barnard’s mysteries, “Bodies” is brisk, literate, cleverly plotted although not a puzzle in the Agatha Christiean sense, and funny in a lightly satirical way. His characters have a fullness, a recognizable common humanity, which is the more impressive because Barnard achieves it so economically. His mysteries rarely run over 200 pages.

He describes a real enough world--Soho was ever so--which is somehow not off-puttingly sordid, although bloody and sordid things may happen within it. More often, he is an amusing tour guide, as in “Political Suicide,” which takes place during a Parliamentary by-election in the provinces. He has a splendid time with candidates, speeches and backroom maneuverings. He was a campaign worker for Labor in 1959. (Labor lost).

Like Ruth Rendell and P. D. James, Barnard has occasionally departed from the straight crime novel. “Out of the Blackout,” published here in 1985, is a suspenseful account of a young man’s attempts to learn his true identity. He had been evacuated to the country during the Blitz, carrying with him no clues of his brief past. There is a mystery-like denouement, but at heart the book is a psychological study, set in carefully noted environments--a village then, shabby off-center London now.

It’s always a question, how does a mystery writer decide to become a mystery writer? In parts of England, it may be as inevitable as a Los Angeles child wanting to be in the movies.

Barnard was born in Essex, not far from Tolleshunt d’Arcy where Margery Allingham, one of the great English mystery writers, lived. She was the regional celebrity. Barnard came to reading (he is 50) when Agatha Christie was in full production.

“I was a horrid, snobbish little schoolboy,” Barnard says, “and I went straight to mysteries, early.” Later he wrote a book analyzing Christie’s success, “A Talent to Deceive,” which is due to be republished by the Mysterious Press in New York shortly.

Barnard went to Oxford and did his dissertation on Dickens’ imagery, later published as a book. He took a first job running a bookshop for the Fabian Society. He taught adult education in the North of England, then went to Australia. He saw an ad for a job teaching English in Bergen, Norway and moved there in 1966, and on to Tromso in 1973. The couple settled in Leeds three years ago, attracted by the local opera company and the nearby scenery.

“I thought, well, I can do a book every two years,” Barnard says. “It’s been more like one every nine months.” He has written a solution to “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” the book that Dickens never completed and that has teased authors ever since (including the makers of the present hit musical).

“Absolutely convincing,” says Barnard. “But no one will publish it.”

Like many mystery writers, Barnard reads other mysteries with a fan’s enthusiasm. He presently admires Timothy Holme, an Englishman writing in Italy, only one of whose three books, “A Funeral of Gondolas,” has thus far been published in the U.S. He also admires George Baxt (“A Queer Way to Die”).

“Christie, of course, is the master puzzler. She’s quite outside time and she’ll sell forever.

“One hears about ‘the cozy English mystery.’ I’m not--Oh, by damn--I’m not cozy. And, come to that, I don’t think Christie was either. Rather a cool lady, in fact.”

Like Dorothy L. Sayers, Christie can be read for clues, conscious and subconscious, to the social attitudes of her times, and not always attractive either. Robert Barnard is much more consciously a describer of his times, and in his case, a satirical commentator upon them. His diversions run through familiar country, colorful although not, as a matter of fact, cozy.