Murder Is Their Business

THE LONG GOODBYE (316 pp.)--Raymond Chandler--Houghton M/ffl/n ($3).

CASINO ROYALE (176 pp.)--Ian Fleming--Mocm/7/on ($2.75).

Good writing is a mystery to most mystery writers. But the border line between a good mystery and a good novel is occasionally crossed, and two new yarns get well over the border. In The Long Goodbye, Old Mystery Hand Raymond Chandler brings back his private eye, Philip Marlowe, for his first stint in more than four years. Casino Roy ale introduces a brand-new mystery writer, Briton Ian Fleming, and a hard-shelled British secret-service operative, James Bond, who should be prowling the international underground for some books to come.

Bitter Coffee. Once regarded as a very tough character. Private Eye Philip Marlowe seems a rather mellow and gentlemanly sleuth these days, especially when measured against Mickey Spillane's neo-Neanderthal Mike Hammer. For one thing, the years have been kind to Marlowe. Introduced in 1939 (in The Big Sleep) as 33, he is still only 42, still trim and lithe. When the pace gets too hectic, Marlowe heads for the kitchen and makes coffee: "Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men." But he is far from the pipe-and-slippers stage.

Marlowe's latest case drops into his arms when he props up a drunk outside an expensive Los Angeles nightspot. The drunk is a weak-willed chap named Terry Lennox who has trouble accepting the twin facts that his beautiful wife is a nymphomaniac and a millionairess. When she has her skull bashed and "gets dead" a few weeks later, Terry seems the logical suspect, except to Marlowe. After two more violent deaths and some incidental lady-killings by Marlowe, the whole case is tied up very suitably.

Chandler still brings some of his sentences to a halt with the too-arresting simile or metaphor. An hour crawls by "like a sick cockroach." A clam-lipped Marlowe says: "What I'd tell him you could fold into a blade of grass." But Chandler's world has a rasping authenticity, from its lingo to its lingerie.

Laced Martinis. Casino Royale poses an unlikely sounding situation and makes it hum with tension. British Agent Bond's job is to gamble against a corrupt French Communist trade union official at the baccarat table of a French casino until he breaks the Frenchman's bankroll and his power. He does, but five murders, a kidnaping, a grisly torture sequence and a suicide intervene before Bond can really call his mission accomplished. Author Fleming keeps his incidents and characters spinning through their paces like juggling balls. As for Bond, he might be Marlowe's younger brother except that he never takes coffee for a bracer, just one large Martini laced with vodka.

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