DEATH AND DECONSTRUCTION

Yes, those hateful deconstructionists are at it againplanting a bomb in the boat returning members of the Coleridge and Other Romantic Poets Society (RPS) from their trip to the Venetian island of San Lazzaro; trashing the flat of RPS chair Martin Proctor; defacing old-money American professor Michael Pomfret's lecture notes with red ink; sending avant-garde theorist LÇon Bracousse a bogus invitation to the RPS's meeting at the Royal Institute; and disrupting the RPS conference at Norman Abbey with a bogus warning of booby-trapped doors. How will it all end? In murder most foul, of course, as Pomfret's nude body is pulled from the River Slype. Chief Supt. John Charter, fortuitously along for the ride despite his lack of interest in the subject, behaves as if he were presiding over an exam, spending most of his time assessing the qualifications of the endless, overripe list of academic suspectsuntil he begins to suspect that whoever was trying to gull Pomfret with a Byron manuscript too juicy to be true and pull all those other pranks may not even have been a deconstructionist at all. Byronist Fleming's first American publication is as Waspish, though not as clever, as most entries in this mysteriously mushrooming subgenre.