BOOK REVIEW : Abundant Suspects, Some Laughs : DEATH OF A HOLLOW MAN<i> by Caroline Graham</i> William Morrow $17.95, 224 pages

The members of the Causton Amateur Dramatic Society may not all have Equity cards, but they certainly have Equity temperaments. When this mystery novel opens, the company is rehearsing “Amadeus,” an ambitious project requiring a cast of 24; just right for the play, but somewhat cumbersome for the reader trying to guess who is responsible for the on-stage death of the leading man.

The acronym CADS seems to describe the entire lot. There are, in fact, so many people involved in this production that we’re constantly referring to the program provided.

There’s young Mozart, played by 19-year-old Nicholas Bradley, a local youngster whose life was forever altered by seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company perform “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in his school gym. Though he’s introduced as a sweet stage-struck kid, we can’t eliminate him from the list of suspects when Esslyn Carmichael, acting the part of Salieri, actually cuts his throat during the suicide scene. Someone secretly removed the tape pasted over the straight razor used as a prop, and might it not be an eager youngster hoping for juicier roles?

We can’t exempt Nicholas. Then there’s the aging prima donna Rosa Crawley, ex-wife of the deceased. Though she’s remarried and apparently resigned herself to a bit part in this production, she’s never forgiven Esslyn for dumping her for the vacuous Kitty, here less than perfectly cast as Constanze. Kitty, we learn somewhat tardily, has found Esslyn a disappointing husband and has been diverting herself with Tim Young, who is otherwise engaged as the constant companion and housemate of Avery Phillips. These two men are not only lovers, but business partners and co-members of CADS; Avery does the stage designs and Tim the lighting.

Tim and Avery have been having serious creative differences with the flamboyant and tyrannical director, Harold Winstanley, who deeply resents having to manage with second-raters like Esslyn Carmichael.

Harold is assisted in his chores by Deidre Tibbs, who has a sad life caring for her father, a tragic victim of Alzheimer’s disease. Shabbily treated as general dogsbody instead of an imaginative aspiring director, Deidre might conceivably have come unhinged from anxiety at home and despair at the theater, deciding upon this melodramatic method of avenging herself on the entire community.

By stretching a point here and there, we could keep virtually everyone in the running. Esslyn has managed to alienate all his colleagues at one time or another, and he’s a slow study to boot. Of the entire company, only Rosa genuinely seems to mourn him, but remember, she’s an actress whose forte was always tragedy. In order to keep production values up to standards, the director has been financing costumes and sets out of his own shallow pocket, thereby severely straining his marriage and his accountancy business.

The problem here is not only a plethora of suspects but also the fact that Carmichael himself seems entirely expendable. On a nastiness scale, the victim and his murderer are virtually interchangeable, and Causton seems a far better place once both of them are out of the way. Graham’s shrewd and likable Chief Inspector Barnaby deserves a more challenging case, as well as a more enlightened assistant than the homophobic Sgt. Troy.

As a satire on amateur theater and the idiosyncratic types who invade it, “Death of a Hollow Man” is often amusing, faltering only when author Caroline Graham reaches for the archly dated style of Allingham, Christie or Marsh. Using Tim and Avery for campy comic relief also seems a tad passe.

Even in a provincial market town like Causton, people seldom call each other “poppet” anymore.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Fairyland” by Sumner Locke Elliott (Harper & Row).