Sleuthmcmship

FABIAN OF THE YARD (208 pp.)--Rob-erf Fabian--British Book Cenfre ($2.75).

"It was 6 a.m., a damp October day, and Miss Dagmar Peters trembled with cold. She was planning to hitchhike to London, thirty miles distant. . . . Six hours later a police-surgeon was examining a ridged blue death-bruise around her throat. She lay spread-eagled among dark shrubbery verging the A20 high road between Maidstone and London. 'Strangled,' said the surgeon."

The corpse of Dagmar Peters was the only clue Scotland Yard's Inspector Robert Fabian had when he arrived on the scene. The man whom the British press calls "the greatest detective in the world" may have been temporarily stymied, but he was not permanently stumped. In this and the 30 other cases he re-enacts in Fabian of the Yard, the inspector relies mostly on elementary, patient common sense and laboratory work, but he flashes enough intuitive genius to hold his own with the best of the fictional homicide squad--Holmes, Maigret, Philo Vance and Nero Wolfe.

The Jury Did Not Believe. With Dagmar's corpse on his hands. Fabian looked around the roadside for signs of a struggle. Finding none, he reasoned that the body had been dumped from a car. The Yard's pathologist bore him out. "She had been seated upright . . . after she died," he said. "Seated in a motor car?" asked Fabian. "Something less upholstered," the doctor suggested. Out went Fabian's order: check all trucks that used the road between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m.

The check proved futile, but Fabian's guess about trucks turned out to be right anyway. When the dead woman's handbag was fished out of a lake far off the A2O road, Fabian traced the course of the bag up an old millstream to a cider works near the road. There he found a pile of newly delivered bricks. On a hunch, he asked for the truckman who had delivered them. The man gave a false name, but Fabian pried loose his real one and a criminal record: "Harold Hagger--16 convictions, including assault on a woman." Hagger blustered that Dagmar Peters had tried to rob him, but "the jury did not believe him, and he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison."

Under the Instep, No Count. Frequently, Fabian made flimsy clues pay big detection dividends. He once flushed a bogus count bent on marrying a U.S. heiress by noting that his shoes had not been polished under the instep, as they would have been had the "count" stayed in swank hotels. Another time Fabian solved a jewel-shop robbery largely because it had been observed that the thief wore a tropical suit and, as he left the scene, cursed a bystander in Arabic. After ferreting out further details from jewel fences, Fabian nabbed a discharged member of the Palestine police force.

A few criminals won Fabian's grudging respect. For physical agility and courage, he feels few can surpass Robert Delaney, the first of the "cat burglars," who rifled jewelry from the bedrooms of Park Lane mansions while their owners were downstairs at dinner. Two men died trying to imitate him. One impaled himself on a spiked railing, and the other fell 40 feet with $32,000 in jewels in his pocket and grimly crawled two miles before dying. Having brought off six jewelry hauls worth some $120,000, Delaney was bagged in his own flat with most of the swag.

After a 28-year stint, Detective Fabian left the Yard in 1949 with some 40 commendations, including the King's Medal for defusing an Irish Republican Army bomb in Piccadilly. Nowadays, he keeps busier than ever as a crime feature writer for the Kemsley newspapers. Looking back over his career, Fabian concludes that most crooks are not too bright. But one, he admits, outwitted him. This was the fellow who squeezed into an eight-inch-wide opening between the back of the kennels and the outside wall at London's White City dog track; he stayed there nearly twelve hours and doped all but one dog in a race, enabling a gambling syndicate to make a $300,000 killing at 5 1/2 to 1 odds. He got clean away. Only one notorious crook, known as "London Johnny," was slim and steely enough to pull the job. says Fabian, but there was no evidence. To this day Fabian and London Johnny exchange an ironic, almost comradely salute when they meet in bars.

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