Notable

FREE FALL IN CRIMSON by John D. MacDonald Harper & Row; 246 pages; $10.95

On his 19th case, "Salvage Consultant" Travis McGee is back in form. The Florida-based knight-errant exhibited signs of age in his last few outings. His likable brawn and cunning intelligence were eroded by diatribes about the deteriorating environment and the credit-card society. Fans began to worry about behavior alteration.

Their concern was premature. True, the big pale-eyed detective sometimes sounds more like Hamlet than Hammett: "You spend too much time in the wings, watching your performance," a friend comments. But once McGee starts investigating a pair of murders, he forgets his complaints long enough to provide high and exuberant entertainment. Initially, he inherits half of a sinister motorcycle shop. The other 50% is owned by an Indian girl called Mits. A renegade biker leads Travis to a drugged producer filming balloon races. On location, he narrowly escapes a mob attack on the crew--seems the technicians had been using local teenagers for a series of porno video tapes. Predictably, their leader, a villain named Dirty Bob, manages to slip through some elaborate defenses and tracks McGee to his opulent houseboat, the Busted Flush. The result is one of MacDonald's King Kong vs. Godzilla confrontations that deliver a soul-satisfying amalgam of mayhem and justice.

After his first fistfight in a year, the battered hero rubs his knuckles and reflects: "People who become legends in their own time usually have very little time left." True enough, unless they are the cream of contemporary detectives, whose ageless task is to bust the bad guys and leave the whining and complaining to lesser mortals.

XPD by Len Deighton Knopf; 339 pages; $12.95

By now, the Sound and the Fuehrer are overfamiliar: an old Nazi project threatens to shake the contemporary world to its foundations. But Spy Master Len Deighton enlivens the pseudo history with some new turns, among them a face-to-face meeting between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Time: 1940. Place: a Belgian bunker. Topic: the surrender of Britain. The Prime Minister, of course, refuses in the end. But so sensitive is the clandestine rendezvous--one of the terms discussed is Nazi control of Ireland--that even two generations later, anyone who learns of it is marked for XPD--Expedient Demise. When the Fuehrer's minutes of the affair threaten to surface, counterintelligence launches a relentless search from Hollywood to Hamburg.

Along with enough plot convolutions, murders and cliffhangers to mesmerize aficionados, Deighton slings spy jargon with knowledgeable elan. He catalogues the latest Swedish submachine gun and the Fuehrersonderzug--Hitler's private train--with field-manual precision. But he has more on his mind than the blueprints of military hardware.

Throughout, Deighton has fun with the formula without compromising its believability. Hitler's former signalman, for instance, has become an East Anglia chicken farmer, in debt for 2,000 Rhode Island Reds. The directors of M16 and BND--West German intelligence--share a passion for cactus growing, exploring ways to XPD mealy bugs. Finally, Deighton delivers a telling pronouncement. The well-heeled film producer Max Breslow, a former SS officer, notes a wall of video games in a Los Angeles pizzeria. "U-Boat Commander" and "Blitzkrieg" produce a deafening flood of electronic babble. "This was the war we won, the war that came after the war." Deighton, in top form, wins this one as well.

THE MEN'S CLUB by Leonard Michaels Farrar, Straus & Giroux 181 pages; $10.95

Leonard Michaels is a short-story writer who occupies a place between Philip Roth and Donald Barthelme in the periodic table of American prose stylists. He secures this position with a first novel that assembles a group of men to emulate a women's consciousness-raising session. In a Berkeley, Calif, living room, a basketball pro, an accountant, a doctor, a lawyer, a real estate agent, a college teacher and a psychotherapist ventilate their feelings and talk about their appetites.

Women, of course, cause the most gnawing and perplexing hungers. Yet the men scarcely begin the tales of wives and lovers when their stomachs start to rumble. The refrigerator, "our ice mother," is raided. Its contents--salads, chicken, turkey, salmon, pecan pie and chocolate cake--are devoured, though they are meant to feed the host's wife and friends.

Before the sun comes up, furniture is overturned, leftovers smeared, a door splintered by knives and the air filled with wolfish howls. The revels end on a note of Maggie and Jiggs, with the woman of the house surveying her fouled nest and beaning her husband with a pot.

Yet The Men's Club is not so much burlesque as carefully paced intellectual striptease. Male armor is dropped to exhibit emotional paralysis; egos wrapped in tough independence are peeled away to show a tender reliance; Playboy fantasies dissolve in humiliating complications. In addition, the author has an original way of derailing conventional narratives with a compact, satiric prose and ripe perceptions. "I feel you're feeling anger," says the host to his enraged wife. It is one of Michaels' many punch lines in this small marvel of modern comic irony.

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