SEND BYGRAVES<i> by Martha Grimes illustrated by Devis Grebu (Putnam: $15.95; 108 pp.) </i>

In the many-metered verse of this savory little book, Martha Grimes wittily sends up the British mystery genre in a premeditated attempt to do away with it. In her story, conventional concoctions--red herrings, misplaced corpses, poisonous affinities--are laced with unfettered self-parody that delectably spreads (like the ubiquitous pools of blood) to encompass all mysteries.

The book could be titled “Waiting for Bygraves,” for this most quintessential British sleuth is as elusive as Kilroy. Bygraves, like Wimsey, Dalgliesh, or Poirot, is the dash-it-all, get-it-done figure on whom others call whenever someone has expired over cyanide-laden tea, or has been stuffed into a potting shed. But he is both absent and omnipresent; readers arrive at information a step ahead of the ethereal, wayward Bygraves, only to find that perhaps he has invented clues--and didn’t the descriptions of Bygraves and of the discovered body match?

The story is gleefully divided into “The Beginning,” “The Middle,” “The End” and “The Epilogue.” Appearing in the poetic narrative are verses with wickedly pithy titles like “The Budgie Clue,” “At the Cobweb Tearooms,” and this one about poisoned dogs, called “Murder Acrostic”:

What’s happened to the Puddley

pack? How could it be they’ve

disappeared? And not a horn to call them back Through copse and comb? It’s as

we’ve feared: Something’s afoot. No one will

shout A view hallo, the whip’s cap up-- Luther, Lisper, Lark, and Luv, Lurcher, leading steady at banks, Throwing tongue near Snuffling

Copse, Hounds that used to feather out Into coverts, rolling up Scent like reels of silk. Now there’s Nothing but silence. Hunter, horn Over a fly country have flown. Where has it gone, the best of the

fun? “Send Bygraves” becomes the watchword of the survivors, a desperate plea of dying souls in an ominous landscape where any one of the triumvirate of murderer, victim and investigator may dance on the other’s grave at a moment’s notice. The stylish and handsome book also includes the dark whimsy of Devis Grebu’s illustrations. But Grimes remains the prime suspect in this criminally grand lark, easily convicted of producing the goods--a literary feast of the macabre, both a loving tribute to and a merry poke at the detective story.