STORYTELLERS: NEW IN APRIL : ‘Sexy, Slick, Searing and Shocking’

From a novelist’s standpoint, just how damning is it--faint-praise-wise--to have yourself described as one who “knows what makes commercial fiction tick?” That’s what Publishers Weekly did to poor Mollie Gregory whose latest work, “Triplets,” is one selection discussed here. Along with suggestions of a great deal of money descending on such a novelist, the phrase commercial fiction, also connotes, alas, a certain shallowness marked by the four “S’s”-- sexy, slick, searing and shocking. Just how fair is it? A little slick, searing, shocking sex never hurt any best- seller, of course, but, fortunately, most (not all, but most) of them offer a bit more in terms of plot, characterization, and setting, either geographically or historically.

Still and all, novelist Clive Cussler (“Cyclops” and “Raise the Titanic!” among others) is no fool in building his latest global adventure, Treasure, around Dirk Pitt, in tacit acknowledgment of the following that his sexy, green-eyed, do-anything protagonist Pitt has attracted in earlier works. Here’s a hero who can stir the libido of a shapely, female, secretary general of the United Nations, even as he is rescuing her in frigid, hip-deep, Arctic waters from a sabotaged airliner. Now that’s sexy. The “treasure” here is the great library and museum of Alexandria, Egypt, spirited to safety in AD 391 to keep it from the clutches of Emperor Theodosius. And we’re off and running in a race to see which superpower uncovers its hiding place first. You name it, you’ve got it in “Treasure,” 1,600 years after the contents of the library disappeared. In addition to the race for the recovery of the archeological find of many centuries, we’ve got hostile terrorists from both Egypt and Mexico slaughtering innocents with gay abandon, a cruise ship hijacked with the presidents of Egypt and Mexico aboard, and a knock-down, drag-out finale on a remote island in Tierra del Fuego. Believability survives with fewer dents in its tough hide than you would suspect in this slam-bang rouser. “Treasure” is a Literary Guild Main Selection, and paperback rights have been sold to Pocket Books.

Not only are the rich unlike thee and me because they have more money, but while we have to pinch pennies, they can afford their bad habits in the form of swankier fat farms and detox clinics. In The Doll Hospital, novelist Peter Menegas takes us behind the secure gates of Connecticut’s posh Tanglewood Clinic where the rich and the famous go for the removal of a variety of back-monkeys--booze and drugs, primarily. There’s the famous actress who can’t handle the stress of her smash new stage triumph, the 19-year-old son of a former U.S. President with an identity crisis, an alcohol-fogged member of Parliament, a high-fashion model at the peak of her career, a heavyweight boxing champion, and on and on. But, for Tanglewood’s dedicated medical director, Roger Cooper, there’s a lot more to worry about than the personal lives of his charitably unstable clientele. There’s also the takeover attempt engineered by his co-owner of the clinic--a man whose own kinky sexual tastes might logically make him eligible for a little clinic time, too. For all its slickness, “The Doll Hospital” is a fascinating, and generally upbeat, study of the problems of drug dependency and how it is frequently being licked.

Well, sure enough, Publishers Weekly had Mollie Gregory pegged to the hilt. Her latest offering, Triplets, is, indeed, slick, searing and shocking, as well as sexy. But it’s also a whale of a story--one that covers the Hollywood scene from the early 1950s to the 1970s as the three Wyman siblings (two girls, Sky and Sara, and the boy, Vail) alternately love each other, are consumed with interfamilial jealousies and are all unmercifully manipulated by their mother, Diana, the sort of stage mother who, as Dracula did with the bat fraternity, gave both vampires and stage mothers such bad names. Their career paths, and their love lives, cross and recross, and personal triumphs go hand-in-hand with personal disasters. As a wag once said of Hollywood and as “Triplets” reaffirms: “If you scratch through the cheap tinsel of the town deeply enough, you’ll get down to the real tinsel.” With a $125,000 advertising and promotional budget, this slick page-turner is going to be seen on more beaches this summer than peeling epidermis.

The glitz of Tinsel Town is a million light years away from Dell Shannon’s unhappy Ireland of the 1650s in The Dispossessed. A black page of history, this was the period when Cromwell’s English Puritans occupied the Emerald Isle, imposed the harshest of military rule, confiscated private property and sold rebellious natives into slavery in the West Indies--a scourge that may explain some of the lingering anti-British sentiment in Ireland. Still and all, “The Dispossessed” is a romance built around Fergal O’Breslin, a young clan chief, the spirited Nessa O’Rafferty and O’Breslin’s attempts to hold his clan together in such stormy times. It’s a story of betrayal, vengeance and seemingly impossible plans to escape the British yoke.

Another tumultuous period of history is the backdrop for Carol J. Kane’s riveting Blood and Sable, in which Princess Anya Sviridova grows to womanhood just as Russian Imperialism is about to fall to the Bolsheviks. Although Kane’s sweeping, and well done, novel of Russia teetering on the brink of chaos is largely sympathetic to an aristocracy that is about to mount the tumbrels, it is also marked by subtle humor at the expense of the same aristocracy’s self-absorption and its narrow and naive view of the world. Anya’s affairs with such disparate lovers as Adam Lowell, the American diplomat, and the Bolshevik firebrand, Oleg Ivanov, are icing on the cake in this engrossing tale of people trying to escape the inescapable. “Blood and Sable” is a major McGraw-Hill effort with national advertising and promotion in place and an initial printing of 50,000 copies. It is a Troll Book Club selection, and both British rights and paperback rights have already been sold.

TREASURE A Dirk Pitt Novel by Clive Cussler (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 541 pp.) THE DOLL HOSPITAL by Peter Menegas (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 448 pp.) TRIPLETS by Mollie Gregory (Franklin Watts: $18.95; 557 pp.) THE DISPOSSESSED by Dell Shannon (William Morrow: $18.95; 384 pp.) BLOOD AND SABLE by Carol J. Kane (McGraw-Hill: $17.95; 474 pp.)