Time to Murder and Create

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Although the 1920s and 1930s are remembered as a golden age for mysteries, that era's exemplar, Agatha Christie, and most of her contemporaries had no gift for taking readers on a journey into another culture or milieu. The fun lay chiefly in guessing, if one cared, who killed Roger Ackroyd. Nowadays, Christie's kind of puzzle, based on clues larded into the text, has largely given way to a more novelistic brand of mystery, in which the solution may not matter that much to either the writer or the reader. The motive for a crime is more likely to be psychological than economic, and therefore the identity of the perpetrator is likely to loom up long before the last page. The detective has become an amiably flawed working stiff rather than a thinking machine. The final chapter is often devoted to the start of a romance for him or his client instead of the laborious untangling of a villain's scheme.

Most satisfying, the new mystery is often about some specific time or place or profession, whether it is Loren D. Estleman's seedy Detroit or William Marshall's nightmare vision of Hong Kong, Tony Hillerman's half-mystical, half-modern Navajo reservation or Jonathan Gash's crooked fringe of the international antiques business. When these books succeed in evoking an environment or ethos, the reader can more readily forgive any lack of suspense or ingenuity in the plot. Sometimes the writer depends on heavy research or personal knowledge: Tennis Star Ilie Nastase and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Writer Frank Deford both published thrillers this year set on the international tennis circuit, and retired Quarterback Fran Tarkenton collaborated on a pro- football mystery. On occasion, the voyage into another world may be largely imaginary: H.R.F. Keating launched his delightful and convincing comic series about Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police -- the latest is the poignant Under a Monsoon Cloud (Viking; 221 pages; $15.95) -- without ever having set foot in India.

The quintessential American mystery features a hard-boiled detective in love with the mean streets of his city. The time-honored setting for that kind of tale is Los Angeles, a la Raymond Chandler, and among the best new mysteries, two spiritual descendants work those byways. Roger L. Simon's swift and funny The Straight Man (Villard; 225 pages; $15.95) deals with the new melting pot. In a tale that combines show-biz sleaze, drug mania and a charity scam, Detective Moses Wine -- an inept martial artist who regularly visits a shrink -- finds himself mingling with urban blacks, Korean immigrant entrepreneurs, East European religious zealots and the random Hispanic. Latins play a larger role in Joseph Hansen's The Little Dog Laughed (Henry Holt; 184 pages; $15.95), a timely thriller about clandestine U.S. involvement in Central America. The book begins as a conventional mystery and features Hansen's detective, Dave Brandstetter, a death-claims investigator for an insurance company who also happens to be homosexual. Hansen's early books took readers into the shadowland between the straight and gay worlds and dealt with the deadly consequences of guilty secrets. His recent work, which has downplayed sexual politics in favor of headline issues like toxic waste, is less distinctive but no less lively and humane. Boston has probably supplanted Los Angeles as the home for hard-boiled writers: eminent practitioners include Robert B. Parker, Gregory Mcdonald, George V. Higgins, Jeremiah Healy and William G. Tapply, who admirably represents the genre in The Marine Corpse (Scribner's; 229 pages; $13.95), a scary and wrenching tale of a Brahmin who is murdered while dressed as a bum to research a book. Who killed him? A relative? The girl he lived with? The man who was his secret lover? A paranoiac drifter he got close to? A closemouthed priest? Some informant or principal in a drug scheme he stumbled onto? Tapply and his detective, Attorney Brady Coyne, ably handle the plethora of subplots and make rich use of Boston's geography and social structure.

For urban edge and macho color, however, nobody tops Loren D. Estleman. Any Man's Death (Mysterious Press; 209 pages; $15.95) stars a continuing character, Contract Killer Peter Macklin. In this terse, crosscut tale, Detroit is in an uproar over a proposal for casino gambling. The new Mob boss wants it, his muscled-out predecessor doesn't, and it is hard to guess the real motives of a rich widow and the televangelist she is bankrolling. Most of this motley crowd, and the assorted lawmen who battle them, tend to shoot first and, to their regret, ask questions later.

For those who prefer sherry to beer and inquests to shoot-outs, there are two promising debuts. Erik Rosenthal's The Calculus of Murder (St. Martin's; 232 pages; $16.75) takes place in some of the swankier areas around San Francisco. His victim is a malign industrialist, his detective a Ph.D. mathematician who works as a private eye while waiting for a teaching job. The narrative bogs down once or twice when Rosenthal lapses into lectures justifying bygone Berkeley radicalism. But he handles the plot skillfully, providing adequate hints to who dun it while misdirecting the reader's attention, and his central character is a charming instance of a novelty, the yuppie detective.

NBC Newsman Douglas Kiker uses Cape Cod in winter as the setting for Murder on Clam Pond (Random House; 228 pages; $15.95), in which a broken-down former newspaper reporter finds a new hometown, renewed professional vigor and the love of a much younger woman, all through probing the murder of his next-door neighbor. What lifts the book above the ordinary is a detailed and subtle portrait of the dark side of charity: the victim is the richest woman in town, and the chief suspects are a group of bright young adults whom she singled out for her largesse.

A great many mysteries feature journalists, largely because a great many mystery writers got their literary start at newspapers. Few have chronicled the freewheeling snoop as extensively, or as comically, as Gregory Mcdonald, Edgar winner and former arts and humanities editor of the Boston Globe, in his series about the impertinent Fletch, a man who breaks all the conventions. Fletch is young and handsome, not paunchy and timeworn; he is ethically shady and quick to grab a buck, not a tattered idealist clinging to principle; he is snippy not only to those in authority but also to working people and the down and out. Fletch, Too (Warner; 249 pages; $15.95) is Mcdonald's ninth and & allegedly last book about this scamp, although only the second in the chronology of Fletch's career: after the character proved a hit, Mcdonald worked forward and backward to fill in his story. In this volume, Fletch sets off to Kenya in search of his father, who has apparently resurfaced after being presumed dead for 20 years. At least one prominent mystery scholar sees the Fletch cycle as a high-minded quest for identity. Less academic readers will find it rakish fun.

Among sports-based books, by far the best is Tarkenton's collaboration with Edgar Winner Herb Resnicow, Murder at the Super Bowl (Morrow; 249 pages; $15.95). Aptly, in what has been an injury-plagued N.F.L. season, the plot turns on the vulnerability -- and, Tarkenton argues, innate pacifism -- of quarterbacks vs. the inherent violence of defensive linemen.

Some American mystery writers pay homage to the past masters of the craft by setting their stories in Britain. The most prominent is Martha Grimes, a sometime teacher of fiction at Johns Hopkins, who ironically was unable to get her work published in Britain until now. Her current offering, I Am the Only Running Footman (Little, Brown; 206 pages; $15.95) -- named, like all her work, for an actual pub -- keenly observes Britain's myriad social classes and offers a persuasive story of family obsession and revenge. Keith Heller attempts the double voyage of writing not only about England but about the early 18th century. His debut, Man's Illegal Life, was a tour de force about urban turmoil in the years before London had police (his detective, named George Man, is a sort of civic night watchman with an awesome sense of duty). Heller's second novel, Man's Storm (Scribner's; 196 pages; $13.95), is in the same vein and invokes in vivid detail the consequences of an actual hurricane recorded by the writer Daniel Defoe, who appears as an ancillary character.

Among genuinely English mystery novelists are two welcome returns. Reginald Hill's detectives Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe are back in Child's Play (Macmillan; 256 pages; $13.95), a sly reworking of that old standby, the aftermath of a singularly willful last will and testament. Simon Brett, author of eleven novels featuring Charles Paris, journeyman actor and amateur sleuth, launches what feels like a new series in A Nice Class of Corpse (Scribner's; 196 pages; $13.95). The novel concerns an inquisitive widow prying into strange doings at a seaside resort hotel that caters to the genteel elderly, and Brett's customary mordant humor is in full cry.

Nicolas Freeling, who broodingly depicted the Netherlands in his Van der Valk series, does the same for provincial France in his series about Police Commissioner Henri Castang, who reappears in Cold Iron (Viking; 225 pages; $15.95). The book is strong on the stoic politics of a police force, the tacit politics of a marriage, the quiet satisfaction when methodology works and Europe's hovering sense of history. No such muted meditation figures in the work of William Marshall. After lampooning polyglot Hong Kong in eleven wackily imaginative and wantonly violent novels, he is doing the same for, or to, the Philippines in Manila Bay (Viking; 215 pages; $15.95). This slash-and- burn revenge tale offers old-fashioned plot thrills and also the new mystery in its apotheosis: Marshall transports readers to an entirely real place that he manages to make dementedly, enchantingly, his own.