Going Beyond Brand Names

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

One almost infallible measure of the true mystery buff is that when asked to cite his favorite current author, he will respond with some name the general public would never recognize. To the obsessive fan, the big story is rarely the arrival of a new Elmore Leonard or Ed McBain or Dick Francis -- although, as it happens, each of those established commercial writers has a new book out at the moment, all of middling quality. The main event is more likely to be, say, a new Simon Brett or Stuart M. Kaminsky, a new Jonathan Valin or Michael Allegretto. These less heralded figures often produce a prose more intense and flavorful, a sense of scene more convincing and a story more tightly wound yet believable than the brand-name superstars. And occasionally an outright newcomer, not hardened thus far by his agent's insistent counsel to repeat what worked before, will come up with a tale that delights by being absolutely original.

The most potent writing to be found in any mystery of recent months appears in Jonathan Valin's Extenuating Circumstances (Delacorte; 234 pages; $15.95). His detective, Harry Stoner, yet another of the shopworn ex-cops so beloved of the genre, is hired to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy politician and do-gooder. The missing man is found tortured to death. His killers: two boy prostitutes, one of whom was seeking a father figure, the other of whom scorned his client as a masochistic "beat freak." The who in this whodunit is known early in the story. Valin is more interested in precisely what happened and why, in how tenderness turned into a transaction and then to fatal abuse. The hustlers' barren backgrounds, the meat-rack bars where they work, the aging queens who shelter them, all are convincingly evoked in Stoner's impassioned journey of detection.

Among other hard-boiled writers, the most impressive effort of the past year comes from Michael Allegretto. His Blood Stone (Scribner's; 261 pages; $16.95) is a superb example of the "cold crime" subgenre. A seedy private eye, approached by an even seedier pal, starts looking for the proceeds of a famous jewel robbery out West a couple of decades after the theft. His allies and enemies in an ever shifting set of alliances include an aging femme fatale, a spunky tomboy and her ex-con grandfather, a trio of murderous Indians, a small-town newspaper editor and a crooked policeman. The plot and mood are vaguely reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon, except that, yes, there is a treasure to be had.

Another homage to the era of The Maltese Falcon appears in Buried Caesars (Mysterious Press; 179 pages; $15.95), in which Stuart M. Kaminsky's sleuth Toby Peters is hired by General Douglas MacArthur on a matter of national security and gets a helping hand from Dashiell Hammett on a spree. The volume is one of the sprightliest in the series built around Peters but is overshadowed by A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's; 210 pages; $15.95), which features Kaminsky's other recurring detective, Soviet policeman Porfiry Rostnikov. That sly and assiduous investigator is dispatched to Siberia to look into the killing of another officer, who in turn was probing the killing of the daughter of a prominent dissident. Despite the smallness and privation of the village, Rostnikov unearths a wealth of believably evoked secrets on his way to a disquietingly equivocal solution.

Simon Brett specializes in what mystery fans call "the cozy," a story in which most of the mayhem is discreetly offstage, and the detective is more likely to be a canny old woman than a boozy middle-aged man. Of the many imitations of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, none has been quite so slippery and criminous as Melita Pargeter, a white-haired, well-heeled widow of a burglar whom Brett beguilingly introduced in 1987's A Nice Class of Corpse. Having skewered the pretenses of her fellow residents of a retirement hotel in that volume, she returns in Mrs, Presumed Dead (Scribner's; 248 pages; $16.95) to expose the follies of an executive suburb where the previous owner of her home has disappeared. Aiding in her attempts to locate the missing woman are a wry assortment of her late husband's crooked cronies, all of them, like Mrs. Pargeter, now at least semilegit.

The newcomer of the year thus far is John Collee, a British physician and writer of TV medical scripts. In A Paper Mask (Arbor House; 232 pages; $16.95), his second book, the premise is that most emergency-room orderlies fancy themselves able, by practical experience, to diagnose and treat patients, and that one of them decides to give it a try. This antihero, who assumes the name and hospital residency of an acquaintance who is killed in an accident before he can report for duty, makes some disastrous mistakes -- but such is the imposing aura of his purported professional credentials that he keeps his post through scrape after scrape, and sometimes does succeed. Nonetheless, he lives in fear of exposure, and tension mounts. The character is depicted with a remarkably skillful blend of empathy and distaste, so that from page to page the reader roots for him to get caught or to get away with - it all. With complete believability, the plot keeps twisting right up to the final words. Like so many fellow toilers in mystery-genre obscurity, Collee proves himself a true novelist. A Paper Mask should satisfy readers who have never cared whether the FBI was bursting into the kitchen or, as Christie suggested in a title, the body was in the library.