Suspects, Subplots and Skulduggery

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

One of life's frustrations for aficionados of the crime novel is the discovery that there are loved ones or esteemed friends who, having sampled the genre, view it with boredom or disdain. The most irritating aspect of the belittlers' criticism is that it is often correct, at least as applied to the humdrum majority among the hundreds of mysteries, thrillers, police procedurals and spy stories published in the U.S. each year. Characters are frequently sketchy, plots more elaborate than coherent, dialogue archly unnatural, and exotic settings tacked on rather than integral to the narrative. Many authors seem to think that a new gimmick -- a detective who is a librarian or social worker, one who works in the Berkshires or the Depression-era Dakotas -- will revitalize a formulaic story. Or they believe adopting a topical theme such as child abuse or computer fraud amounts to having something new to say.

Fortunately for the dignity of fans, every publishing season brings along at least a few items of sufficient literary merit or sheer entertainment value to make a mystery addiction seem respectable. This year's leading entries come from two old hands at humor, one regaining his form after several lean years, the other moving on to complex sociological terrain. Also affording special pleasure are a Sherlockian pastiche from an elder statesman, the eagerly awaited return of two detectives whose creator prefers plumbing the darkest of psyches, a couple of hard-boiled escapades centered on the trade in illegal immigrants, and two nightmare imaginings that unfold underground.

The best mystery of the year to date is in fact a splendid mainstream novel exploring a theme that links almost all good mysteries with the larger literary tradition: the burden of the past. Robert Barnard, a specialist in snide japery (Death of an Old Goat), turns deceptively gentle and affectionate in The Skeleton in the Grass (Scribner's; 199 pages; $15.95), which focuses on the subtleties of the relationship between the teenage daughter of a poor British clergyman and the aristocratic family she is sent to join, as something between servant and family member, during the fateful summer of 1936. Among the moneyed Hallams, who are paradigms of noblesse oblige and liberal rectitude, the Spanish Civil War has become a daily obsession, and the eventuality of a broader war in Europe is an accepted fact. This political awareness, and their pacifist response, makes the Hallams national celebrities but slowly turns them into village pariahs. The ghostly bones of the title are used by local toughs in a campaign of harassment that ends in murder.

Just when these events have wrung the utmost sympathy and admiration for the Hallams from the reader, Barnard shakes the kaleidoscope: in a tour de force passage of inner monologue, the visiting girl re-examines some seemingly unimportant events to expose how the family's pieties about mankind have masked a cruel indifference to individual people. The field of potential suspects thereby doubles to include the noble clan. More important, what happened on a moonlit lawn, and why, becomes less a puzzle and more a metaphor for a social system on the brink of change. Throughout, Barnard's narrative never loses its tight focus on a domestic world as richly evoked as in anything by Galsworthy or Trollope.

At the other end of the scale of literary sobriety is Donald E. Westlake's sprightly Trust Me on This (Mysterious Press; 293 pages; $16.95), which satirizes the seemingly unsatirizable. After faltering in recent years, Westlake recoups in perhaps the most beguiling beheading of journalists since Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. The targets are the tabloid weeklies that feature UFO sightings, no-dieting diets and a "body in a box," that is, surreptitious photos of a dead celebrity in his casket. Rather than mock the already preposterous, Westlake explores the mentality that capable, rational people would need in order to crank out such stuff. In a particularly wry inversion of the norms of detective fiction, a young woman reporter bursts into the newsroom on her first day to tell her bosses she has come upon a murdered corpse just a few hundred yards from their office -- only to have it explained to her that unless the victim is a household name, this item has no news value. The young woman soon learns to excel at the chicanery by which the tabloid's "stories" are concocted, yet keeps pondering the disappearance of the corpse and other oddities until her legitimate reportorial instincts first imperil and then save her. The mystery does not equal the standard set by past Westlake plots but is as sternly instructive as buying diamond futures from a boiler-room telephone huckster.

Probably the hardest kind of crime novel to write is the exploration of the criminal mind from within, the stream of psychotic consciousness brought to its peak in past years by Julian Symons (The Players and the Game) and Ruth Rendell (Live Flesh). That sort of book has been attempted unsuccessfully this season by Robert B. Parker, whose uninsightful Crimson Joy (Delacorte; 211 pages; $16.95) suggests that he would do better to return to slam-bang action. Symons and Rendell, meanwhile, are represented by more conventional fare resurrecting characters from some of their earlier novels.

Symons' The Kentish Manor Murders (Viking; 191 pages; $15.95) is his third book starring the quirky Sheridan Haynes, an actor who, in portraying the Baker Street detective onstage, has developed an inflated sense of his celebrity and powers of deduction. The plot seems to have been inspired by the life of Howard Hughes: it involves both a plutocrat so reclusive that he is rumored to be dead and a daring literary forgery -- this time a "lost" Conan Doyle manuscript. Rendell has often said that she would prefer to concentrate on individual stories of twisted minds, but feels compelled by her fans to revive the suburban detective team of rumpled Reg Wexford and prissy Mike Burden. Having indulged her own preference to dazzling effect in her past seven volumes -- two published under her alternate byline, Barbara Vine -- Rendell now indulges readers in The Veiled One (Pantheon; 278 pages; $17.95). If the underlying appeal of most mysteries is the promise of moral order, that may explain why fans have such a hard time with Rendell's psychological novels, which are eerily nonjudgmental in the face of true dementia, and why they are so comforted by Wexford's moral outrage and Burden's unwavering duty. Both characters are in fine form in this new tale, which begins with a murder and an explosion and ends with a solution and the reconstruction of the bombed house.

Someday an enterprising cartographer will publish a map of the world, annotated with the operating locales of fictional detectives. Until this year, not much of note would have appeared next to the name Jerusalem. But it is there that Roger L. Simon's Moses Wine traverses the labyrinths of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in Raising the Dead (Villard; 228 pages; $15.95). Wine, an American Jew who combines pratfall vulnerability with foolhardy vigor, finds himself hired by Arabs to penetrate an organization much like the militant Jewish Defense League.

Simon's swift-paced and snappily told tale cannot compare, however, with Jonathan Kellerman's The Butcher's Theater (Bantam; 627 pages; $19.95), a sprawling yet spellbinding plunge into Jerusalem's ethnic, religious and social cauldron. Kellerman, a clinical psychologist whose previous books have featured a psychologist as detective, turns here to tracking the emotional evolution of a serial killer and the creation of a multiethnic police team to catch him before his savagery destroys the fragile equilibrium among Jews, Arabs and Christians. The mawkishly melodramatic finale is Kellerman's only miscalculation in a vivid, fascinating tale.

In the hard-boiled genre, the most ironic triumph is Charles Willeford's The Way We Die Now (Random House; 245 pages; $15.95), a snake-mean slice of South Florida lowlife that might finally have brought overdue recognition if its author had not died in March of this year. Haitian illegal immigrants and Cuban Marielitos are among the supporting victims and sleaze artists in a multiplot story featuring a ruthless but effective cop whose beat is long- unsolved murders. A.E. Maxwell's equally colorful Just Enough Light to Kill (Doubleday; 254 pages; $16.95) blends Soviet high-tech espionage with striking tableaux of Latin American immigrants paying a few hundred dollars to be herded like cattle across the U.S. border and Hong Kong Chinese anteing up thousands to be ferried door to door.

There is also a true relic of the age of pulp: Dashiell Hammett's Woman in the Dark (Knopf; 96 pages; $15.95), overpriced and oversold as a "novel," but compelling on its terms as a sketchbook romance between two losers who share a fierce sense of their own integrity. Other notable reprints include Michael Gilbert's Young Petrella (Harper & Row; 222 pages; $15.95), a collection of magazine stories from the 1950s and '60s that display his trademark Scotland Yard detective with a deadpan precision of mood worthy of Simenon, and A Double Life (Little, Brown; 246 pages; $17.95), short gothic chillers by Louisa May Alcott.

The oddest of the season's worthwhile offerings, or at least the hardest to explain, are William Marshall's War Machine (Mysterious Press; 220 pages; $15.95) and Reginald Hill's Underworld (Scribner's; 280 pages; $14.95). Marshall's 15 weird suspense novels are all set in either the Philippines or, as in this case, Hong Kong and feature seemingly supernatural events that turn out to have logical, if not precisely rational, origins. He has savage fun with police procedure, the culture clashes of East and West and the intrusive effects of each place's multinational colonial history. In War Machine, someone appears to be restaging World War II from catacombs beneath an old army encampment, for reasons readers may only halfway comprehend but are likely to enjoy thoroughly.

Hill's novel also features subterranean action, in coal shafts both employed and abandoned. He blends earnest depiction of working-class culture, subtle glimpses of the corrosive effect of crime on victims and perpetrators, a doomed romance between a miner and a police official's college teacher wife, a series of comic set pieces starring the official's bullying superior, and a whole slew of secrets unwisely unearthed. The daring mingling of genres works rather better than the cluttered plot. Most memorable are the scenes of the central character, a wilder version of the bright boy who is the schoolteacher's beneficiary in The Corn Is Green. Even in this messy story, those passages could make believers of many who have given up too soon on the mystery as literature.