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\"Mysteries of Paris: The Quest for Morton Fullerton,\" by Marion Mainwaring. University Press of New England. 327 pages. $30. Mainwaring, who completed [Edith Wharton]'s unfinished novel \"The Buccaneers,\" in 1993, evidently found this book hard slogging. She tells of years spent in a frustrating, circular and maddeningly speculative struggle to pin down the facts of Fullerton's life. Mainwaring's work is not compelling biography. She lays out Fullerton's most obvious characteristics -- self-aggrandizer, mooch and womanizer. But she does not bring his character to life, nor explain why such a cad inspired Wharton's passion and [Henry James]' enduring loyalty. The book is peopled by the intellectual and economic elite of three nations, from the reign of Queen Victoria to the Nazi occupation of Paris. But it offers few new insights into the class and the era.

''I THINK it is my duty to put you in mind,'' wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her husband in 1741, ''that in so near a relation as that of father and son, there is no medium between a thorough displeasure and a thorough reconciliation.'' This lack of a medium was never a problem for Lady Mary and her husband, who remained absolute in their displeasure with their son Edward, whose life encompassed every crime from bigamy and theft to the publishing of a book that his mother considered ''nonsensical.'' Lady Mary's observation is relevant to some of the other profiles included in [Christopher Simon Sykes]'s ''Black Sheep,'' a miscellany of misbehavior among members of the English aristocracy, to which class Mr. Sykes has confined his survey, both because ''the greater the escutcheon, the more violent the stain upon it'' and because ''to the aristocracy the honour of the family was allimportant.'' Or the ''match of 500, between five turkeys and five geese, to run from Norwich to London,'' which George Walpole, Lord Orford, helped to arrange on the way to dissipating his grandfather's great collection of paintings, many of which now hang in the Soviet Union's Hermitage, having been sold over two centuries ago to Empress Catherine of Russia.