Books: At His Boozy Best

THE SCARPERER by Brendan Behan. 158 pages. Doubeday. $3.95.

To scarper is to make off, to run away, to escape, in Irish slang. And to scarper is what the young Brendan Behan must often have dreamed of doing in the six years he spent soberly behind bars, rather than convivially touring them. He put those dreams to good use in this merry and murderous mock-suspense story about a professional impresario of escapes at work in the underworld of Dublin, and Paris.

By masterminding a successful jailbreak for a rich client every couple of years, the businessman-of-crime known as the Scarperer makes enough to live the life of a gent of leisure. This time the trick is trickier. The client is a toff London tough lodged in Dublin’s Mountjoy penitentiary, and the price is 5,000 nicker. But when the limey is sprung by the Scarperer’s guileful crew, he finds himself the victim of a Gaelic doublecross. The Scarperer has arranged to have him drowned and his body washed up on the coast of France. The implausible explanation: he closely resembles a richer client of the Scarperer —a French desperado who has commissioned this elaborate plan to get himself off the Suretes most-wanted list.

What makes the plot bubble is the Behan people and the Behan gab. There is Pig’s Eye O’Donnell the bet runner, Tralee Trembles the wino and ex-poet, M’sieu Le Tramtrack, who spent 30 years abed in an effort to collect damages from a trolley company, and the vigorous old lady of the International

Society for the Defence of the Horse, who stumbles on the Scarperer’s scheme while trying to prevent Irish horses from being butchered for French tables. Gangster or guard, barfly or bystander, every one is deftly pinned to the specimen board with as little as a sentence or two of dialogue.

Behan wrote The Scarperer in 1953, at the height of his boozy powers. Published under a pseudonym as a serial in the Irish Times, it was rediscovered only after Behan offhandedly mentioned it to his London editor nearly ten years later. Light as a feather, compassionate, unsentimental, this high comedy about low life is the most artfully constructed thing the impulsive Behan ever wrote.