Man shot in locked room : THE MASTER OF THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT Leo Perutz Tr Eric Mosbacher Harvill £14.95

Written in 1921, this elegant novel of suspense strikes a fine contrast between the crisp quality of its prose and the shadowy world of ambiguity and fear that it describes. Starting apparently as a straightforward murder mystery - man shot inside a locked room - The Master of the Day of Judgment gradually develops into a psychological cautionary tale.

Leo Perutz was a Czech Jew who lived in Vienna until fleeing from the Nazis in 1938, a contemporary of Kafka and Rilke. At the time this book was published he was one of the most popular writers in German, but has since been all but forgotten. Set in Vienna in 1909, Perutz's dark tale of judgment would make a good play, as it is based not on introspection but on a series of intense encounters.

The backdrop of the autumnal city is sketched in with a few evocative, melancholy strokes: a wet pavement, a chestnut leaf which drifts into the room through an open door, a street vendor offering blackthorn branches and winter cherries. The book gains its essential tension from the fact that the narrator - the Baron - is the prime suspect for the bizarre deaths that take place. Furthermore, in a moment of semi-consciousness, he has a vision of himself committing the first crime, placing the reader on shifting ground, unsure of the Baron's innocence yet reliant on his interpretation of events. This creates a sense of apprehension and unease which intensifies as the tale develops.

Perutz's central preoccupation here is the visual imagination, a suggestive theme lifting the book right out of the whodunnit genre. The trail of victims, which leads back to a Renaissance painter, is marked by their common desire to stimulate their fantasy, to bear forth creatures of the mind.The old Florentine artist's inner eye is growing cloudy, and therefore his art is mortally threatened. Four centuries later, the ageing, aristocratic actor Eugene Bischoff is positively tormented by his inability to conjure up his characters before him: "creative imagination cannot be learnt," he cries, "You have it or you don't. I lack the imagination that can make a world out of nothing . . .'' These stranded creative souls will risk anything to achieve that visionary fire. Perutz becomes Christopher Marlowe, promising the infinite reaches of aspiration - "his dominion that exceeds in this / Stretches as far as doth the mind of man.''

Unfortunately, as Faustus too finds out, the seat of the imagination is also the seat of fear, and each of the victims encounters his or her own Day of Judgment, constructed from atrocities peculiar to their own worst nightmares. Perutz directs with a sure hand even when his characters stare into the abyss.