Talmudic Triumph

By Martha Duffy

TUESDAY THE RABBI SAW RED by HARRY KEMELMAN 276 pages. Field. $6.95.

Friday the rabbi slept late, Saturday he went hungry, Sunday he stayed home, and Monday he took off (for Israel). On Tuesday, in this popular mystery series, Rabbi David Small is back with his congregation in the Massachusetts town of Barnard's Crossing. A colleague who is also going to Israel recommends Small as his replacement teacher of a course in Jewish philosophy at a nearby college. He begins his academic side career with customary zeal. When a bomb goes off in the dean's office, apparently killing a faculty member, the police first arrest student radicals, then a dissident Jewish professor. Using his Talmudic method of looking at a problem from every conceivable angle, Rabbi Small finds a different murderer with a surefire motive: sexual jealousy.

Kemelman's mysteries are unpretentious models of their kind. He writes orderly, ungimmicked plots, creates cleanly drawn characters and scrupulously avoids explicit sex and sadism. He places his mysteries in the context of the busy, stable life of a Conservative Jew. The rabbi's liturgical calendar, the duties and derelictions of his flock, their relations with the town's Roman Catholics--represented by Chief Lanigan and Father Ahern--are all taken with wry, judicious seriousness. There are few such solid series around. Chesterton and Father Brown would bless Kemelman and his rabbi.

.Martha Duffy

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