Storytellers: New in December

And what is that sly and prankish Saint Nick going to leave on your hearth on Christmas morning? The usual, of course: peace, good will, a microwave oven, snow tires and perhaps a new cashmere sweater to replace the one that got caught in the blender. But if Nick is of a literary bent this December, he’s got a wide range of popular fiction to heap on you too--everything from puckish humor to international intrigue to historical romance to a brace of front-burner bodice-rippers.

Tongue firmly in cheek, Rita Mae Brown has turned her fancy loose on the sleepy little town of Runnymeade--split, smack-dab down the middle, by the Mason-Dixon line--the feuding Hunsenmeir sisters and an adopted daughter of one of the sisters, Nickel Smith, and her mixed-up love life. In Bingo Brown has a field day with Julia Ellen Hunsenmeir Smith, 82 years old and a running kite flier of singular talents, and her sister, Louise, admitting to 80 and pushing 86, and the fight between them to nail the eligible new widower in town, Edgar Tutweiler Walters. Their sparring ring: the town’s weekly Bingo game, held every Friday night in the St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church. Nickel (actually, Nicole), Julia’s bisexual adopted daughter, has conflicts of her own to resolve: how to buy the Runnymeade Clarion, the newspaper for which she works, from the retiring publisher to keep the ownership local, and how to rationalize her torrid affair with her best friend’s husband. Being half the town’s admitted gay population (the other is Mr. Pierre, who operates the Curl ‘n’ Twirl) has its pressures. Underneath Runnymeade’s placid, Southern exterior--where the statue of a Yankee general on a horse stands on the Pennsylvania side of the main street and faces Confederate soldiers and a Rebel cannon on the Maryland side--all hell is prepared to break loose when the Bingo game of the year, Bingo Blackout, reaches its climax.

While, at times, Brown’s humor can get a tad arch, she’s produced, on balance, a genuinely funny novel, and some of the one-line zappers between the two sprightly Hunsenmeir sisters are better than anything you’ll hear at the Improv. Bantam is planning a 75,000-copy first printing and a major marketing effort for this latest work by the author of “The Rubyfruit Jungle” and “Six of One.”

All of which is a far cry from the serious business of international intrigue that Len Deighton (remembered best for his “The Ipcress File”) brings us in Spy Hook. This is billed as the first of a trilogy starring the cool, unflappable British agent, Bernard Sampson--unflappable, perhaps, but vaguely uneasy here in his middle age as he copes with the reality of his wife Fiona’s defection to the East Bloc and as he tries to adjust to a new live-in lover half his age and her attempts to mold him into a rose-tending suburbanite. And, at stake, are millions of pounds that have disappeared from within the British Secret Service and Samson’s effort to trace them--a trail that leads him from London to Washington to a posh coastal estate in California, and to both sides of the Iron Curtain. How, suddenly, does he find himself confronted in California by his once-senior officer in the Service, but who was gunned down and pronounced dead before Samson’s very eyes a full three years earlier? How, too, is the CIA involved in a matter that is supposed to be entirely an internal British affair? Deighton’s craftsmanship--his taut action and his insightful study of complex characters under pressure--is very much in place here, but many of these unanswered questions raised in “Spy Hook” remain just that at the novel’s conclusion: unanswered. This is, after all, a trilogy, we must remember and, like the old Saturday matinee adventures of Buster Crabbe, we’ll presumably have the loose ends tied together next Saturday, or whenever. This is a Book-of-the-Month Club alternative selection.

There has to be a muted undercurrent of admiration for a novelist who will end her brief prologue with a strikingly beautiful woman dashing into a Las Vegas wedding chapel, shoving the bride and groom apart and shouting: “You can’t marry! You’re brother and sister!” This is called the Run-Run-Jump school of story development. It is also how syndicated gossip columnist Marilyn Beck gets us involved--right up to the knees--in the Byzantine plot of her first novel, Only Make Believe, a title that one should keep firmly in mind as we explore how Hollywood powerhouse Ann Peters became president of production for a major motion picture studio. My dear, you wouldn’t believe what a girl has to suffer, how many people have to be crushed, seduced, raped and ruthlessly thrust aside, to make it in today’s Hollywood. To explore Beck’s plot in detail--how Ann and her sister are raised by their Army major father and Turkish mother in both Virginia and Turkey, narrowly escape being exploited in their uncle’s brothel in Ankara, are spirited back to America on an ocean liner by a movie actor who absent-mindedly forgets that the girls are aboard except for one casual rape of Ann, etc.--is a little bit like trying to read the wiring diagram for a turbo generator. Are the bride and groom in the Las Vegas chapel really brother and sister? Can a heel like the rapist movie actor become a powerful U.S. senator? Is there life after cinematic death on the cutting-room floor? Stay tuned. Beck, whose column is read by about 38 million people, takes Hollywood very, very seriously, which is a major part of the problem here. She writes with a breathless style and a built-in glitz instinct that will undoubtedly earn her thousands of fans in the Advanced Panting school of literature appreciation.

Dancing nimbly back and forth between 1962, 1942, 1968, 1975 and the Presidential Inaugural Ball of 1993--and dropping more real-life names (the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Hoffa, etc.) than an overenthusiastic flower girl spraying rose pedals, novelist June Flaum Singer has a rip-roaring field day with her adroitly timed political thriller, The President’s Women. This is basically the story of the three Collings sisters--the stolid Francesca, the exotic Carlotta and the mousy Judith--and the men they alternately bed, wed, abandon and re-bed. But the focal point is the resourceful and ruthless Judith who, mouse-like or not, is manipulative of everyone in a way that makes a professional three-card Monte dealer look fumble-fingered in comparison. First, she maneuvers her way to a fortune, then to a child she can groom for Great Things and on and on. Judith’s ultimate goal--a few decades down the road--is to have control of the presidency of the United States neatly zippered into her jeweled clutch-purse. If not via handsome World War II hero Bill Sheridan (unfortunately, he’s smitten with Carlotta), then through any other buy-able man at hand. Singer, fresh from such successes as “The Markoff Women” and “Star Dreams,” has shaped the “Who’s-in-bed-with-whom?” novel technique into a form of high art. Sexy, racy and far from predictable, “The President’s Women” is a fascinating blend of history, pseudo-history and a really wild imagination. Does the evil Judith slink her way into the White House? We’ll never tell.

There’s a bit more historical reality, however, in Barry Jay Kaplan’s Biscayne, a three-generation novel built around the founding of Miami and its evolution from a mosquito-ridden, alligator-snapping backwater populated by a few Seminoles in the late 1800s to today’s glittering, cosmopolitan metropolis--but still with a mosquito problem. Centering on the strong-willed, wealthy Clara Reade, returning from Ohio to her birthplace after being widowed, and her 18-year-old son, Harry, “Biscayne” is a study of Clara’s determination to turn this sow’s ear of a town into a silken purse. Primarily, though, it’s a study of the battle between Clara, her sailor-lover Quentin McLeod, son Harry and railroad mogul F. Morrison Wheeler over the direction and nature of Miami’s growth--as a sun Mecca, a citrus center, a major shipping port or all of the above. Miami, and the protagonists of this obviously well-researched work, have crises aplenty: the city’s troubled role as the jumping-off point during the Spanish-American War, a yellow-fever epidemic and quarantine, one economic boom and bust after another, a grandiose--and ruinous--attempt to drain the Everglades for more real estate development. Nobody really wins in his or her vision of what 1988 Miami should be in this sprawling and ambitious novel. Happily, no one completely loses, either, but among the clear winners will be readers who have an interest in this lusty corner of the United States.

BINGO

by Rita Mae Brown (Bantam Books: $18.95; 304 pp . ) SPY HOOK

by Len Deighton (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 304 pp.) ONLY MAKE BELIEVE

by Marilyn Beck (Jove Books: $4.50; 448 pp.) THE PRESIDENT’S WOMEN

by June Flaum Singer (Crown: $19.95; 503 pp.) BISCAYNE

by Barry Jay Kaplan (Simon & Schuster: $19.95; 416 pp.)