A staple of women’s fashion magazines has...

A staple of women’s fashion magazines has always been the feature on how to give your old clothes a contemporary look, with the addition of some au courant accessories. No need to throw out that warhorse of a gray suit. Just snazz it up and everyone will believe it’s brand new.

The same theory seems to be at work in a lot of popular fiction. It would be crazy to discard a classic, tried-and-true plot, even if it’s been sitting in the fiction closet forever. Time and again, authors take a story out of mothballs--the favorite is the saga of the woman who has nothing and ends up with everything--and drape a stylish literary scarf on it, or cinch it with a belt of trendy bon mots. Presto. It’s a whole new outfit.

Take Danielle Steel’s Star. It’s the standard cautionary tale of a beautiful girl, here called Crystal Wyatt. Crystal lives on a ranch with her doting dad, her emotional skinflint of a mother, two siblings, and, as the story opens, her new, drunken brother-in-law. When Dad dies, Mom and Sis go into a convincing imitation of Cinderella’s wicked relatives, while Crystal pines for an older man she first glimpsed at her sister’s wedding. Her home life becomes intolerable, the object of her affections marries a woman who should set working women back a good century, and Crystal endures an oddly comfy purgatory as an Oscar-winning actress.

She finally returns, rich and famous enough to make these moves at the drop of a Rolls hubcap, to the ranch of her childhood and the beau of her adolescence. It’s the little black dress of blockbuster fiction, with a couple of details tacked on here and there to distinguish it from Steel’s earlier tales of girls who pulled themselves up by their (in this case, cowboy) bootstraps.

The only problem is that Steel seems to be getting a bit weary of the game. Details of time, place and designer, which are the hard currency of this kind of book, are offhanded and vague in “Star,” as though the author was getting tired of such chores as specificity. And Steel’s phrase computer repeats itself. After the umpteenth affectionate reference to Crystal being totally unaware of her striking beauty, you have to wonder: How dumb is this girl?

Beattie Blythe, one of the heroines of Frances Donnelly’s Shake Down the Stars, is plenty smart, enough so to win a college scholarship and escape the tiny village of Musgrave--an unlikely opportunity for the daughter of an estate gardener in Great Britain just before World War II. But she’s a fool for love, which lands her pregnant by Brooke, the swank cad brother of the elegant, haughty Virginia. Lucy, who is kinder than Virginia and wealthier than Beattie, rounds out the trio of girls who become older and wiser during the war.

It’s a predictable enough journey--though the reader recognizes the fellow Beattie ought to love a bit before she does, we know she’s going to come to her senses before the last page; that’s a given in a book like this. What makes “Shake Down the Stars” stand out is the care with which Donnelly attacks the project. If Steel has become a bored minimalist, Donnelly, with the fervent devotion of a first novelist, has embroidered her book with an intricate pattern of details and lovingly realized settings.

If you prefer French haute couture, Paul-Loup Sulitzer’s Hannah has been translated from the French by Christine Donougher. Not content with being a best-selling novelist in his own country, Sulitzer wants to colonize the States with a novel based on the life of cosmetic queen, Helena Rubinstein. It’s cut according to the basic pattern, without panache: Hannah flees Poland, finds and marries the boy she once loved, and before you can say pancake makeup, has a string of successful beauty salons throughout Europe. If that isn’t enough to lure you, the publisher is prepared to market Monsieur Sulitzer as well--who, given his history as a rich kid who lost everything, made half a million dollars on a key ring-collecting craze, won and lost a few more fortunes, and most recently purchased the plane that Mathias Rust flew into Moscow, might have been better off writing his autobiography.

Last, and least like the others, is The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams, who may be the thinking man’s Christian La Croix. What a riotous concoction this is: Adams brings back gumshoe Dirk Gently (of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency), who has to figure out why a ticket desk at Heathrow suddenly went up in flames one otherwise calm afternoon. Forget rounding up the usual suspects--among others, Gently’s going to come across a couple of Norse gods, the requisite sweet young damsel, and a particularly terrifying teen-age creature who’s really addicted to television.

Adams has a tendency--no, a somewhat obsessive habit--of anthropomorphizing everything (“The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of policemen and did a lot of what’s-all-thising around the room . . .”), which makes the world he writes about a rather agitated zoo. But this seems one place where more, not less, is more. If an author is about to collect royalties on millions of cloth copies sold, it seems only fair that he make the effort to surprise and entertain his customers.

STAR

by Danielle Steel (Delacorte Press: $19.95; 447 pp.) SHAKE DOWN THE STARS

by Frances Donnelly (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 506 pp.) HANNAH

by Paul-Loup Sulitzer (Poseidon Press: $18.95; 416 pp.) THE LONG DARK TEA-TIME OF THE SOUL

by Douglas Adams (Simon & Schuster: $16.95; 251 pp.)