Mixed Fiction

ROUGH WINDS OF MAY, by Nancy Hallinan (425 pp.; Harper; $3.95), is a first novel that leaps like a trout with lust for life. A canny angler, Novelist Hallinan, 34, uses enough bait for three regulation novels: 1) the English family, full of cooings, cluckings, crises and crumpets, 2) the adolescent caterpillar sprouting the butterfly wings of maturity, 3) the Panlike pipings of Bohemia competing with the dull drill calls of middle-class life. Novelist Hallinan's Pan is a fat, wheezing, believable genius named Jubial Kerr who huffs and puffs rude reality into Rough Winds of May. To the world at large, he is J. K., England's greatest painter. To the Kerr household, he is Fatuncle, a lifelong, irresponsible nuisance who only comes around to cadge money and food. When his 16-year-old niece Celia goes to pose for him, she meets a double man who divides and finally conquers her loyalties. On one of his Olympian binges, or gnawing a chicken wing, he seems like another Charles Laughton playing Henry VIII. But behind the regal belch hides the lonely and fiercely honest old artist. He mercilessly paints Celia in a cage, an adolescent waif trapped behind the narrow bars of parental thou-shalt-nots. At novel's end, with Fatuncle's help, she has flown the coop to become a woman--her own woman. Author Hallinan has written a fine and pleasing novel, even if her prose is occasionally more breathless than deathless.

A MOST CONTAGIOUS GAME, by Samuel Grafton (256 pp.; Doubleday; $3.75), is a fast, offbeat little yarn about a magazine reporter who is handed a money belt with $5,000 and told to sink into the New York City underworld in order to write an expose. Both the underworld and the police promptly mistake Reporter Dan Lewis for a mobster from Kansas City. After taking a brutal beating, he is put to bed by a brunette bit of fluff who soon climbs in with him. Dan becomes a bodyguard for a gambling czar, kills a man, takes over a bookie ring of his own. He all but forgets about reporting as he becomes infatuated with the world of crime --with its sense of power, its money that produces a kind of evil freedom, its masculinity ("The deferential male is an object of derision to criminal woman"). Much of this first novel's wayward charm lies in its passing epigrammatic remarks. Sample, on a TV M.C.: "He was a matador who played human beings instead of bulls." On reporters: "They have, every two or three years, the satisfaction of being told to find the truth . . . This is why newspapermen are content to wear dusty gray suits and to have love affairs which are 95% conversations in the back rooms of bars."

Himself a longtime newsman (Philadelphia Record, New York Post), Author Grafton has found no startling truths about big crime--his plot in the end becomes downright hokum--but he offers many fascinating insights: how it feels before a holdup, the psychology of crap shooting, the relaxed domesticity enjoyed by the off-duty criminal. He can also be quietly amusing, as when he compares a detective's carefully indirect questions about a robbery ("I hear some pals stopped in to see you last night") to a modern poet who must find "some oblique and more beautiful way of indicating what he [means] ... He was a good detective, almost as allusive as T. S. Eliot." Ex-Newspaperman Grafton has managed to light up a few odd corners of the human heart with a Speed Graphic.

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