John Mortimer, who is well known for his diverting memoir “Clinging to the Wreckage,” is the son of a barrister, whose blindness enhanced his performances at the bar. The son also trained for the bar but turned novelist, then playwright and scriptwriter; like many lawyers, he has a natural talent for the detective story. In his latest novel, “Paradise Postponed” (Viking; $17.95), the element of detection is doubled. There is no body in the library, but there is an inexplicable will. The real body is the state of English society and mceurs from 1945 to the rise of Thatcherism and the Falklands War...

The reader is at first lost in a maze of flashbacks. A Victorian novelist would not have been so fluid; he would have moralized his way through past circumstance, building as he went. Mr. Mortimer has chosen the speedier, leapfrogging skills of the scriptwriter and the television camera. We are viewers rather than readers. In this respect, “Paradise Postponed” is like, say, “Dynasty,” a story that moves backward as it moves forward, but without the money and the fashion show.

Throughout ''Paradise Postponed,'' Mr. Mortimer's wry authorial tone steers delicately between sentiment and satire. In his skillful hands, we seem to be viewing the world from a very great distance - far away enough to make even the tragedies slightly comic - while at the same time we are right inside the characters' heads. And Mr. Mortimer's prose is so easygoing, so companionable, that he appears to accomplish this act of literary ventriloquism without moving his lips.