Books: The Stung

THE SILVER BEARS by PAUL ERDMAN 260 pages. Scribner's. $6.95.

Like the Mississippi, the swindle theme runs deep, wide and muddy through the heart of American literature. Melville navigated the subject on the river boat Fidele, which he filled with assorted rascals for his novel The Confidence Man. It was no coincidence that in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn the shuck and the flim-flam cut across racial and class lines, from Nigger Jim's magical hair ball to the King and the Duke's pretentious ripoffs.

Today the con game is bigger, more complex and even respectable. The jet liner and the telex cable have replaced the side-wheeler and the raft. Even the suckers are more impressive, as Equity Funding stockholders and the recent star-studded list of unfortunate Home-Stake oil-drilling investors has indicated. Yet there is still no first-class novel of contemporary American business. Perhaps it is because those who know the most about the subject are satisfied to be putting their creative talents to more profitable use.

Baser Metal. Paul Erdman is an exception. Although he is not the James Joyce of high finance, he is not Jacqueline Susann either. His plots and characters tend to be simple, but he combines a zest for the intricate poetry of the big deal with the ability and cheerful willingness to explain it. His first novel, the bestselling The Billion Dollar Sure Thing, straightened out the mysterious alchemy of the international gold market. It earned added interest from Erdman himself, a financier and economist who wrote the book while a resident in the Basel prison. The Swiss government insisted that he remain its guest for ten months after the American-owned Swiss bank that Erdman managed failed. Several of the bank's officials went too long in cocoa and silver futures and tried to cover their mistake by fudging the books.

The Silver Bears deals in a baser metal, but it is just as entertaining and instructive as the first novel. Although names and places have been somewhat altered, the plot is built on the manic-depressive 1968 fluctuations in the price of silver that made millions for a few and skinned thousands who were convinced that silver had nowhere to go but up.

It was, Erdman believes, the largest market manipulation in history, and his fact-filled fictional explanation goes like this. Some American Mafiosi, looking for a place to launder their tainted, untaxed dollars, buy a small Swiss bank. One of their first ventures is to bankroll an aristocratic Iranian who claims to have a huge silver mine. Word of this hoard leaks out to one of the world's richest men who also enjoys cornering the world's silver supply. Fearing that the Iranian's silver will flood the market and dilute the price, he makes an offer that even the Mafia cannot refuse.