Solve It Again, Sam

By John Skow

Repetition is honored as a necessary principle in the music of Bach, the spin of prayer wheels and the effective swinging of a baseball bat over the long season and into the play-offs, but not in the matter of cop-and-crime stories. This is unfair. "You're reading another one of his?" the addict's spouse derides, leaving unspoken the remainder of the gibe ("rather than learning Italian or visiting the sick and aged").

"Just so, O moon," the addict replies.

"But they're all the same."

"Just so." And why not? When the 20th crime fable by a skilled old pro turns up on the library shelf, the heart of the villainy enthusiast knows peace. Brain cells may safely graze. Here, newly old, are four of this season's best crime novels by writers who've been around the course a few times:

Finnegan's Week by Joseph Wambaugh (Morrow; 348 pages; $22) is a caper story of a kind, if getting through the workweek without sinking into occupational depression, or into yet another doomed marriage, can be called a caper. Finbar Finnegan is a San Diego cop with three ex-wives and a receding hairline, but only in real life. He hates his job and wants to be an actor, and as this cheerfully silly tale commences, he is mugging into the bathroom mirror, preparing to audition for the part of a contract killer on a TV cop show.

But the audition bombs, and Finnegan must go on chasing real-life bad guys, toxic-waste dumpers, into the wilds of Tijuana. A couple of beautiful women detectives assist him in this nonsense, whose seriousness may be judged by Finnegan's dire judgment that "the watershed event that signaled the collapse of American civilization was the colorization of The Maltese Falcon."

Hard to argue that civilization is in tip-top shape, and Elmore Leonard isn't in the mood to try. In Pronto (Delacorte; 265 pages; $21.95) it's the Mob that has gone mushy. Harry Arno, a South Florida bookie, has reached what would be retirement age if you retired from the kind of business associations he has made, which you don't. But he does. He has been skimming the Mob's share of the take for years, and he has used the boodle to buy a villa in Rapallo, Italy, where he was stationed as a young G.I. during World War II.

Why Rapallo? Because Leonard, who has written 30 crime novels, most of them set in Detroit, now quite understandably wants to write about Rapallo. Maybe even, who knows, write off a trip to Rapallo as a business expense; nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, Arno is pursued ineptly by the Florida Mob and its bumbling parent organization in Italy, and also by his mistress Joyce and a U.S. marshal named Raylan Givens. Arno, who's 66, is thinking of trading in Joyce, who's about 40, for a younger tootsie, although maybe not, she still looks pretty good, and he hasn't decided. Straight-shooting Raylan isn't really thinking -- it's not what he does best -- but he's determined to find Arno, save Joyce from peril and foil the evildoers, and by page 256, it all works out. Always has, in Leonard's quirky tales; always will.

Bomber's Law by George V. Higgins (Henry Holt; 296 pages; $22.50) would work superbly as a play, and if you typed it up in scenes and acts instead of chapters, that's what it would be. Scene 1 sets matters moving briskly, though without corpses or car chases: two cops who hate each other's guts are sitting in a Chevy Blazer, doing some kind of surveillance near Boston. And talking. Always talking, in Higgins' novels; mean, edged, sly talk that goes on endlessly and, it seems, aimlessly until, to the astonishment of talkers and readers, it has coiled around character, event, motive and story.

The novel's major puzzles are why Brennan, the tough old cop on the surveillance team, has gone wrong after a good career; and why Harry Dell'Appa, the smart, cocky young cop, was banished to the Siberia of western Massachusetts. When Dell'Appa finally figures things out, it's clear that Brennan explained himself in the first few sentences he spoke and that Dell'Appa isn't the only smart, ruthless member of his own family. The novel is mannered and the narration moves crabwise, and some readers may bail out. The rest of us may agree that this is one of Higgins' best efforts since The Digger's Game.

Lawrence Block writes shadowy thrillers about a recovering alcoholic named Matthew Scudder who knows a lot about the dark side of New York City, where he does enough private detective work to keep the rent paid on his crummy hotel room. Sometimes Scudder makes a point of saying that it's a nice day and that the sun is shining, but this never seems convincing. He's a night man, with a turned-up raincoat collar.

In The Devil Knows You're Dead (Morrow; 316 pages; $20), Scudder lurks about trying to clear a half-mad homeless man of a murder charge. Why would this fellow have shot a well-dressed yuppie in a phone booth? Then, just when Scudder has discovered that the natty corpse had a lot of enemies -- he made his money ratting on tax evaders and drug dealers to the IRS and the DEA -- the homeless man is stabbed to death in prison. What's happening? The murk deepens enough to involve moral ambiguities for Scudder before he works out the answers.

Novelist Block does a good, convincing job with Scudder and his puzzle, but comes up flat with the solution, which involves two unrelated coincidences. The two deaths on which the story pivots turn out to be essentially meaningless, and this may be closer to real life than a thriller plot can safely walk.