PUT A LITTLE MYSTERY IN HOLIDAYS

The thing about giving mysteries for Christmas is that if you are careful and clever enough, you can read them first, thereby making crime pay double.

For the mystery-consumer whose interest extends beyond merely fighting insomnia, one of the year’s most offbeat works is “High Art,” by Rubem Fonseca (Harper & Row: $17.95). Fonseca is a Brazilian lawyer-writer and this is his first book to appear in English.

The setting is Brazil; the feeling, which flowers in Ellen Watson’s lively translation from the Portuguese, is of Raymond Chandler exploring a different set of mean streets, with a lawyer protagonist named Mandrake whose sense of honor is present, although more deeply embedded in sins of the flesh than Philip Marlowe’s.

Like Chandler, and with the same poetic eye and ear, Fonseca reports on cynicism and corruption in high places and low, on the coast and in inland villages. There are incompetent assassins, a lot of knife-play, drugs and prostitution, a good deal of philosophical discussion and loving attention to food and drink.

The time is now but there are atmospheric kinships with the movie “Chinatown,” for example. “High Art” seems less a crime novel with aspirations to go straight than a straight novel about present-day Brazil, with crime its incidental milieu. Toughly funny, oddly melancholy and restoratively fresh.

A somewhat similar exploration of nasty lowlife on the Los Angeles-New Orleans axis is to be found in Robert Campbell’s “In La-La Land We Trust” (The Mysterious Press: $15.95), which commences with a bagged severed head refusing to sink in a Louisiana swamp, with the headless torso soon emerging from the back of a station wagon after a minor fender-bender on a rainy night on Hollywood Boulevard.

As you would expect, the story just soars from there. The hero, Whistler, is simply the least soiled of an unprecedentedly seamy lot, not excluding a minor prince of the Church. Porn--up to and including snuff films--and the necessary supportive corruptions are part of the scene, which Campbell, safely resident in upstanding Carmel, writes about with wit and vigor. The comparison, not unflattering, is to Elmore Leonard, and it is satisfying to note that the villains get their due and the (relative) innocents win the promise of better days.

For a relieving change of pace, I seize “The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder” (Penzler Books: $16.95) by the ingenious Patricia Highsmith, who wrote “Strangers on a Train” and the series about the anti-heroic, expatriate con man Ripley. In these very sardonic stories, the protagonists are all animals which, or who, get rid of their generally despicable human owners.

Among those who turn the tables in a heartening way are a whole factory’s worth of battery-raised chickens, who can take their cruel captivity no longer. A ferret, a poodle, a cat, some hamsters all strike back. An evening with Highsmith and you are likely to quicken your step passing a pet shop. It’s all wonderfully sly and inventive.

The most consistently comic and prolific of American mysterians is Donald E. Westlake, represented earlier this year by “Good Behavior” (Mysterious Press: $15.95), in which his bungling burglar, Dortmunder, falls through a skylight into a metropolitan convent. In lieu of turning him over to the cops, the good sisters assign him as penance three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys and the reverse kidnaping of a kidnap victim. (As I now remember, prayers weren’t part of the deal.)

The victim is a convent novice whose tyrannical tycoon father didn’t raise his daughter to be a sister and has had her nabbed and held prisoner by a deprogrammer in a high-rise slightly more secure than Ft. Knox. How Dortmunder goes about springing her is, of course, entirely preposterous but cheering to read.

The novice is a spirited young woman who, you feel, would in another month have had her captors begging for mercy and the option of a year’s community service with Mother Teresa. Earlier Dortmunder stories were filmed as “The Hot Rock” and “The Bank Shot.”

Not officially published until Jan. 1 but probably in stores already is Tony Hillerman’s “Skinwalkers” (Harper & Row: $15.95), the latest in his unique series of mysteries set on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. His two detectives, Navajo Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Hopi officer Jim Chee, this time join forces, uneasily.

Someone has fired a shotgun at the sleeping Chee for no discoverable reason. There is a small string of equally inexplicable killings around the reservations. As always, Hillerman with great skill evokes the sights, sounds, smells and feel of the reservation country. With equal skill he weaves ancient tribal beliefs into situations that, in the end, turn on matters as real as 20th-Century greed. Skinwalkers are evil witches whom the superstitious might wish to kill as having caused the death of a child, for example.

In his capturing of a special place and a special tradition, Hillerman is unique, and “Skinwalkers” is one of his best works yet.

Although its incidental music is from the espionage and thriller trade, John le Carre’s “A Perfect Spy” is a work of literature about a father-and-son relationship, and about a life’s conditioning that gives the choice of spying as a trade a kind of inevitability and makes a later moment of betrayal all but indistinguishable in the confused and contradictory pressures of friendship, conviction and circumstances. Of all the year’s works that touch the crime genre, Le Carre’s masterful “A Perfect Spy” is likeliest to be around the longest.