Roman

By Donald Morrison

MURDER AT ELAINE'S by Ron Rosenbaum Stonehill; 192 pages; $7.95

Elaine's, as even people in Peoria know, is that raffish gin mill on Manhattan's Upper East Side where the sleeker elements of publishing and broadcasting gather to eat roadhouse food and trade gossip. Over the years, journalists have grown into Hollywood-gauge celebrities, and Elaine's has now become so chic, so select, so humid with status and power, that some people would kill for a good table.

That, at least, is the premise of Ron Rosenbaum's delightfully bitchy first novel, a tale of lethal venality among the nation's media mandarins. Rosenbaum, 32, is a former Village Voice staff member who protested Editor Clay Felker's 1974 takeover by ripping up his paycheck in the new owner's face (to which Felker is reported to have asked, "Who was that?"). In Murder, a Felkeresque press lord named Walter Foster loses his empire in an unfriendly takeover. Then, worse fate, he is displaced from his regular table at Elaine's by a younger publishing whiz, Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, making a cameo appearance under his own name. After a long exile, Foster returns unexpectedly one steamy August night when the restaurant is mysteriously jammed with patrons who ought to be in the Hamptons. The lights go out, a shot is heard and Foster is found under his old table, dead as Collier's, Viva and New Times.

In classic Agatha Christie fashion, nearly everybody in Elaine's had motives to blue-pencil Foster: unforgotten literary feuds, unhealed editorial schisms, unfavorable reviews, stolen story ideas, purloined wives. It also turns out that Foster's murder--as puzzled out by a hero who blends the best characteristics of hard-drugging Rolling Stone Writer Hunter Thompson and a freelancer named Rosenbaum--has much to do with Watergate. Many journalists consider that scandal their calling's finest hour. Foster, writes Rosenbaum, "caught the crest of the wave of media fever that engulfed mid-Seventies America. Woodward and Bernstein brought down a President; Redford and Hoffman enshrined the heroic reporters as symbolic successors. The entire journalism profession swelled with newly inflated prestige, power and self-esteem." In Rosenbaum's cunning roman `a Clay, however, the gleaming knights of the choice tables are less interested in truth and light than drugs and kinky sex, and they are otherwise as morally flawed as the conspirators of the Nixon White House. But then, that is something the folks in Peoria have suspected all along. -- Donald Morrison

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