MYSTERIOUS DELIGHTS IN OTHER LANDS

Those of us who consume mysteries with such insatiable appetite read them for much the same reasons people go to the movies: escape, vicarious excitement, a truce from the battlefields of life and possibly a vague reassurance that things turn out OK once in a while.

Excellence is in itself an attraction, and there is great pleasure in contemplating anything that has been done supremely well. New generations keep finding their way to Sherlock Holmes out of no mere antiquarian interest but because the originality, ingenuity, vividness of character and detailing of period of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales retain a freshness undulled by the passage of years.

Mystery readers don’t demand to be educated, or feel the need to justify their wayward tastes. Yet among the further rewards of the form are trips to foreign places. Those are occasionally mythical in their convenient tidiness; consider the all-purpose country village favored by Agatha Christie and her innumerable descendants.

But there are other trips that have the mundane credibility of documentary, and more rain and lethal accident than any travelogue.

Georges Simenon has made police headquarters on the Quai des Orfevres as familiar as the corner market down anybody’s street, and beyond the Quai all of Paris and much of France from Normandy to Cannes. In dozens of novels Inspector Jules Maigret, with his pipes and his thirsts, has become as real as an uncle.

Simenon was so amazingly prolific in his prime that, even though he is now in his 80s and no longer writing, new titles keep appearing in this country. Just published here is “Maigret and the Gangsters” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95, 162 pp), which first appeared in French in 1952. The translation, so effortless it seems to deny there was ever another language involved, is by Louise Varese.

This time Maigret has trouble with a wheezing, dyspeptic detective who loses a body, which moves about like a puck in an international hockey match, pursued by a visiting assistant D.A. and three minor but nasty gangsters from the United States. Maigret, as is his custom, endures boring stakeouts, does psychological battle with local lowlifes, drinks when he can, grumbles and catches cold but, in the end, demonstrates the efficiency of the French police and then takes to bed.

Maigret’s is the Paris that a tourist may glimpse from a rushing taxi. Simenon stops and opens the door and invites the visitor to get to know the arrondissement a bit better. In 1952, it was not yet a risk. In 1986 it is more than ever an instructive enjoyment to let Simenon show the way.

Henry Reymond Fitzwalter (Harry) Keating’s series of novels about Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay Criminal Investigation Department was launched in 1964, before, it is said, Keating had actually had a chance to visit Bombay and check out the territory. Then again, Jules Verne never actually made it to the bottom of the sea.

Keating’s Bombay and his shrewd, awkward, self-effacing detective are as carefully and sympathetically seen as Simenon’s Paris and Maigret, or James McClure’s South Africa with his mixed team of Tromp Kramer and the Bantu sergeant Mickey Zondi.

Ghote’s latest adventure, “Under a Monsoon Cloud” (Viking, $14.95, 221 pp.) is not really a mystery as such but a kind of moral suspense story, virtually a straight novel that happens to center on a familiar figure from another range of fiction. (Keating has written 21 crime novels and four non-crime novels as well as a study of Sherlock Holmes and a tasty appreciation of other mystery writers called “Murder Must Appetize.”)

Ghote, temporarily assigned to the command of a remote hill station, is thrust into the awkward situation of covering up an accidental death that will look all too much like murder implicating Ghote’s honest, demanding mentor--to whom Ghote owes his career.

To lie, to dance upon half-truths or to tell all is Ghote’s dilemma.

The drenching monsoon rains are climatically perfect incidental music to the inspector’s anguishes, which Keating presents with unpatronizing sympathy and humor. The judicial goings-on offer their own fascination, and the denouement of the dilemma is a wry, sly twist that is as startling as any Christie surprise, and wonderful in its philosophical rightness, honoring both justice and fairness.

One of the best of the earlier titles is “Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote,” in which he is drawn into the bizarre world of Bombay movie making, which resembles a Hollywood that has never left the ‘40s.

Keating, not yet a wide American enthusiasm, opens another corner of the world to the public if not yet the private eye.