BOOK REVIEW : A Nice Novel That Belies Its Early Promise : REVOLUTION 9 <i> by Peter Abrahams</i> , The Mysterious Press, $18.95; 325 pages

They call this novel a “thriller,” but that’s not a very accurate description. It works instead like a kind of reassuring lullaby, its formula as familiar as Perry Mason reruns. “Revolution 9” is a cross between the later Alfred Hitchcock films and Naomi Foner’s film of ‘60s revolutionaries living underground, “Running on Empty.”

The novel’s beginning seems like something new and different, but about a quarter of the way through, it swings into sweet old melodies of blood, guts, bombs, people who are essentially innocent and so on. It’s nice. But it’s no thriller.

Charlie Ochs lives by himself in an East Coast fishing enclave. He’s a lobster man who keeps to himself and has for 18 years.

That’s because when he was in college, he fell in with dubious companions who did drugs, participated in demonstrations and, when the U.S. invasion of Cambodia became public, decided to blow up the ROTC office on campus. There was one hitch. Even though the explosion occurred in the pre-dawn hours, a son of the ROTC officer was in the building, looking for his catcher’s mitt. So he died. Ochs (at that time Blake Wrightman) and his revolutionary colleagues decided to go underground.

Now, in the present, a professional protester/attorney and theatrical hambone, Victor Hugo Klein, lives in San Francisco and persists in getting his left-wing clients acquitted. (Even if they’re convicted, Klein’s reputation and income goes inexorably up.)

It absolutely gets on the nerves of a renegade CIA man named Goodnow (do you like all these symbolic names?), who decides to go after Klein once and for all. There isn’t much time, since Goodnow is dying of cancer in graphic and terrible ways.

Goodnow and his stupid henchman, Buzz, catch up with lobster man Ochs just as he--like a very hesitant and cautious gopher--has stuck his head above ground long enough to get married. Goodnow makes a fairly preposterous deal with poor old Charlie: You can keep your wife, your baby-to-be, your lobster pots, your house, your life, if you just turn up your old terrorist colleague, Rebecca. Go back and visit the past, Charlie. See what you can turn up.

(I would just like to take this moment in time to ask: Why do there always have to be four suspects (or four whatevers) in this kind of story? Is it because the writers of these thrillers eschewed Perry Mason and watched Barnaby Jones reruns, where four suspects were always the required number? This is a profound question, and not one with an easy answer.)

Ochs journeys back to the college he attended and ends up questioning Stu Levine, the acid-dropping mad scientist (who allegedly constructed the original bomb); Malik, the platitude-spouting revolutionary who thought of this explosion in the first place, and Rebecca (now Yvonne) who--in the great tradition of the 1960s--was sleeping with all of them, using her hormonal advantage to fuel the fires of class war. Rebecca, of course, is Klein’s daughter. Goodnow is counting on Wrightman/Ochs to get to Rebecca, who will, in turn, lead Goodnow to Klein.

It doesn’t turn out that way exactly. Ochs finds out a lot about the past that he didn’t know at the time. The novel is perfectly fine summer reading. It will keep you up late but not scare you to death. No complaints, no complaints.

It’s just that the first 25 pages, giving us Ochs as a character alone and in need, hurting from something we don’t know yet, was so good. It could have led into something more than a thriller and something more than a summer lullaby. It could have led into a genuinely interesting and original novel.