The Many Guises of Mysteries

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When mystery fans start swapping the names of favorite books and authors, they often sound as though they are speaking of several conflicting genres. Devotees of locked-room puzzle stories may disdain the hard-boiled private-eye saga. The tea-sipping pleasures of naughtiness in a village can seem overrefined in comparison with the beer, blood and brawling in big-city police procedurals. Like the roving players in Hamlet, the authors of mystery fiction are prepared to entertain in veins lyrical, tragical, comical and historical and in moods from the slyly literary to the sociologically earnest.

Even the nomenclature is open to debate. Some "mysteries" contain no puzzle or enigma. In many modern "detective" stories there is no true detective. What the French call a roman policier may not actually include the police. The British surmount the problem by calling the genre crime fiction. Perhaps the crime story is like pornography in Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's oft-cited formulation: impossible to define but unmistakable in its effects.

Among those most devoted to stretching the mystery are its two best writers, Britons Peter Dickinson and Ruth Rendell. Each of Dickinson's 16 mysteries has something unique and haunting at its heart, from Sleep and His Brother, set at a clinic for children doomed to compulsive somnolence and early death, to The Poison Oracle, centering on linguistic research among apes at a desert sultanate's laboratory. Perfect Gallows (Pantheon; 234 pages; $16.95) traces the psychic development of a world-class actor who through much of the narrative has barely set foot on a stage, yet feels absolutely certain of his craft and ultimate triumph.

The story bristles with shrewd ideas on topics as varied as how Shakespeare's The Tempest ought to be played (an amateur production is the fulcrum of the plot) to the role of egalitarian wartime food rationing in dismantling the old British class structure. The budding artist coolly looks on everything -- from his mother's death during World War II bombing to his own accidental hastening of an aged relative's demise -- as mere material. His outlook could be that of a genius or a schizophrenic or a psychopath. The confluence among those personalities is precisely Dickinson's point and confers most of the book's considerable suspense. Comparisons to Dostoyevsky are not out of order.

Rendell's most recent work, Talking to Strange Men (Pantheon; 280 pages; $16.95), eerily recalls Lord of the Flies. Her schoolboys and -girls are not washed up on some island but housed in upper-middle-class comfort. Yet mentally they inhabit an unseen world where they play an elaborate game of spy and counterspy, conducted with high solemnity and utter ruthlessness. This emotional tinderbox is ignited when the espionage is discovered by an unstable outsider who believes he has found evidence of treason. Rendell's trademark is to invert the classic adventure story: rather than transmute ordinary men into heroes, exceptional events crush them into madness.

James McClure's stories about two policemen in his native South Africa, one white and one black, have been noteworthy in equal measure for their poignant evocation of that land, their perception of partnership and their acute sense of sexual obsession. The last is at the core of a novel that otherwise breaks new ground for him. Imago (Penzler; 244 pages; $16.95) is a mystery that offers no real mystery, no official detective, no police action of consequence and no crime -- yet is flavored with an authentic elixir of suspicion and dread. The central character is a radiologist caught up in what his psychiatrist colleagues would label a mid-life crisis: thunderstruck by the nubile daughter of old friends, he undertakes a frenzied search for signs of reciprocity. The result is either hysteria or someone's genuine plot to drive him crazy. Imago lacks the sociological acuity and command of character of McClure's best work, but it vividly portrays the emotional peaks and troughs of infatuation.

At the other end of the scale of seriousness are two works notable for their sheer larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting. The plot is merely serviceable and the cast of characters sprawling rather than sharply defined, but the machine-gun barrage of witticisms from its formidable ladies is either a well-researched compendium of bons mots or a wholly convincing imitation.

Peter Lovesey's Bertie and the Tinman (Mysterious Press; 212 pages; $15.95) features a first-person amateur detective who is none other than the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria's son and heir. Lovesey proved himself the world's foremost concocter of latter-day Victoriana in his series of mysteries built around Sergeant Cribb, then echoed the early 20th century in the nostalgic Hollywood story Keystone and the brilliantly plotted thriller The False Inspector Dew. Here he returns to 19th century London and, as always, to a subtle but relentless dissection of Britain's unjust social-class system. The rueful, candid voice he gives to the fleshy prince rings true, the details of the horse-racing and music-hall worlds are vivid, and much of the tale is sweetly funny -- as when His Royal Highness, disguised to investigate a murder, is accosted by a streetwalker who addresses him amiably as "Tubby."

Historical novelty is a widespread preoccupation of mystery writers, whether to vary their stories or display newly found erudition or simply to write off a vacation trip on their tax returns. Ellis Peters offers her 14th chronicle of Brother Cadfael, a resolutely logical monk who is a 12th century forerunner of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, in The Hermit of Eyton Forest (Mysterious Press; 224 pages; $15.95). Peters' narratives suffer from cuteness and rarely make medieval people come alive as convincingly as, say, the ancient Greeks and Persians in the novels of Mary Renault. But she weaves a plot ably and is extremely effective at dividing the world into good guys and bad guys and working up the reader's rooting interest.

Los Angeles has attracted as many first-rate mystery novelists as any other metropolis, and none have been better at evoking the landscape, the light, the architecture and the ethnic diversity than Joseph Hansen. The ninth and most affecting of his series featuring Dave Brandstetter, a homosexual insurance- claims investigator, returns the private eye to the byways of the gay subculture, particularly among more secretive and closeted denizens. Early Graves (Mysterious Press; 184 pages; $15.95) is not the first novel to deal with the impact of AIDS and will surely not be the last, but it will probably rank with the best. It begins with Brandstetter's discovery of a corpse on his doorstep, the latest in a string of victims who were all dying of the virus already. His effort to unravel what turns out to be two related mysteries takes him to the homes of abandoned victims, grieving families and lovers, co- workers deep into denial. Their quicksand feelings of fear mingled with shame and rage are powerfully drawn and linger in the mind. Apart from its virtues as fiction, Hansen's book is a field correspondent's breathtaking dispatch from a community in the midst of disaster.

Loren D. Estleman's misfortune in life can be summed up in one name: Elmore Leonard. Were it not for his fellow Detroiter's surge to fame and best sellerdom, Estleman would doubtless be known as the poet of Motor City. An award winner both for private-eye fiction and for westerns, Estleman is, fittingly, never better than when describing a road and vehicles in combat on it. He is almost as good at evoking places, whether a sterile office complex, a blind-pig saloon in a ghetto, a shack in a Michigan version of Dogpatch or a patio in a smug suburb. His ear for diverse patois seems impeccable, and so does the inner mechanism that tells him when an unlikely escape can be plausible or when violence must instead turn into calamity. Downriver (Houghton Mifflin; 210 pages; $15.95) offsets those virtues with a plot that, like other recent work of his, relies unsatisfyingly on impersonation and concealed identity, and places conveniently offstage his investigator's neater tricks of digging up information or penetrating a security barrier.

Of the Boston-area writers, William G. Tapply seems to grow the most from book to book. The Vulgar Boatman (Scribner's; 226 pages; $14.95) almost leaps from the headlines: a charismatic Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate is hit by a family scandal that seems to result from careful orchestration of the media. Complicating the plot are sexual twists, sadistic murders and a high school-based drug ring that exploits the gap in computer awareness between young people and most of their elders. The infectious spread of the drug culture into comfortable suburbs and small towns is nothing new in either fact or fiction, but Tapply treats it with affecting indignation. The candidate's teenage son, in whom the plots connect, is particularly touching and believable.

Hardly anyone writes anymore in the Golden Age vein of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and other proponents of the thinking-machine detective and the sort of plot one could dissect strictly through armchair ratiocination. But many readers and nearly all mystery writers were nurtured on such stuff, so every now and then a master of the more modern, psychological style will feel prompted to an affectionate pastiche. H.R.F. Keating's The Body in the Billiard Room (Viking; 247 pages; $15.95) transplants his sedulous, canny but congenitally modest Bombay detective Ganesh Ghote to a decaying but pretentious club in Ootacamund, an erstwhile hill station still redolent of the raj. There a dotty old official prattles on about the style of detection he has encountered in books, and expects Ghote to strut like Hercule Poirot. The obligatory murder has in fact taken place in the socially appropriate billiard room; the situation amounts to a classic locked-room puzzle; the suspects are all elite.

Keating superbly manages the balance between a send-up of the Golden Age and a revival of it. But more powerful are the scenes in which Ghote travels outside the club and back into the real India of poverty, caste conflict and never Westernized religion and custom. The story has suspense, illicit sex, danger and ample comic relief. Perhaps the best measure of Keating's achievement is that this book makes mystery a single genre again: it is hard to imagine a fan, of whatever tastes, who will not greet it with delight.