There is no attempt to conceal the...

There is no attempt to conceal the identity of Barbara Vine as being, in fact, Ruth Rendell, but the name game evidently keeps her two different publishers happy. It also gives Rendell two voices, and the Vine novels stray even further from traditional crime fiction than the Rendell oeuvres.

The House of Stairs is the third of the Vines, after “A Dark-Adapted Eye” and “A Fatal Inversion.” It is terrific: a densely textured, poetic study of murder once done (although of whom and by whom is teasingly withheld, the victim unidentified until nearly the end).

The present as lived and the past as revealed converge like cars at an intersection, and in the crash . . . but that is the author’s last teasing mystery. Vine-Rendell sets herself harder, subtler tasks each time out. “The House of Stairs” is something of an homage to Henry James, whose writing figures in the plot.

The house was a tall walk-up (106 steps) in a decaying London neighborhood in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was presided over by a rich, kind, vague woman named Cosette who supported an odd assortment of hangers-on. One of them was the narrator, a woman who writes trashy thrillers. Her fear that she may have inherited Huntington’s chorea, the wasting neurological affliction that killed Woody Guthrie, lends a curious dissonant tension to the narrative.

Another resident was a strange, hostile figure named Christabel, just out of prison in present time as the unfoldings begin. The handling of time is in fact ingenious, present and past overlapping and dissolving one into another in the narrator’s consciousness. The identifying of the several characters and relationships in a peculiar house in a particular time is the work of a superior writer, who engenders suspense not out of arbitrary events but from the inexorable collision of souls. Once again the line between crime and “straight” fiction is not easy to discern.

Donald E. Westlake, whose satiric send-up of check-out-stand journalism, “Trust Me on This,” is shortly to be filmed, is probably the most consistently amusing of American crime writers. He, too, likes to set himself literary challenges. His new work, Sacred Monster, is a sparkling little set-piece in the form of a long interview with a booze-soaked, drug-dazed superstar, the sacred monster of the title. Nothing is quite what it seems, of course, to the star or to the reader.

Westlake’s ingenuity at spinning out his tale and working his sleight-of-hand finale is an audacious treat. What he did to scandal sheets he has now done to Hollywood’s bad manners and worse mores, with much the same infusion of hard truths.

E. C. Ward’s A Nice Little Beach Town is so close to Newport Beach (where the author lives) that it hardly requires a name of its own, although she calls it White’s Bay. Her nice little but surprisingly violent tale has at its pulsing heart the skyrocketing value of beach properties.

An elderly Swedish fisherman is found shot, and his tenant, an idealistic high school teacher, becomes the chief suspect when he and his ex-wife inherit the old man’s newly pricey pieces of coastal turf. An outraged son-in-law, an irascible developer and his runaway son, a pyromaniac and assorted other thugs paint the town gory. A likable and urbane story, mayhem notwithstanding.

Blind Side by William Bayer is an offbeat item that incorporates some pictures ostensibly taken by the photojournalist who is narrating the story. (Bayer provided both words and pictures.)

The photographer has been taking arty shots of inanimate objects since a traumatic battle-zone experience left him unable to photograph people. A seemingly chance encounter with a sexy model propels him over his block and into a messy world of murder, blackmail, double-crosses and redouble-crosses, all against a backdrop of obsessive sex, plain and kinky.

Bayer has created a heroine of hypnotic untrustworthiness and a hero who is altogether too trusting but a great counterpuncher, even after he’s been blind-sided. The story’s credibility quotient is very low but its pace is fast, its temperature high.

Stoney Winston, the continuing figure in a series by Jim Stinson of Pasadena, is a low-budget jack-of-nearly-all-film-trades, living in one of those decrepit houses that cling to Laurel Canyon like burrs. In Truck Shot, Winston is reduced (I think that’s the right word) to teaching film temporarily at a failing art school tucked in the San Gabriel foothills.

You’d think the school would be allowed to expire quietly, but an exploding kiln that kills an instructor also blows the lid off a whole paste pot of evil deeds, defalcations, cheating on exams, naked greed and much else. Winston is quickly up to his lens-cap in confusion and danger.

Stinson, himself a sometime film writer who also does software training manuals, writes about jobs and geography he knows well and it lends a comfortable credibility to his work. Winston is an easygoing sort, a welcome change from the current sleuths who are either burnt-out or too wisecrackingly clever by half.

Jesse Sublett made a reputation as a bass player and songwriter in his native Austin, Tex. He now lives in Los Angeles, but his Rock Critic Murders is set in Austin and is marvelously enriched by Sublett’s close acquaintance with the city’s vigorous rock scene. The viewpoint, I’d say, is astringent but affectionate, although he makes neither the scene nor the city sound like a Boy Scout jamboree.

His protagonist is a bass player, named, with unbearable appropriateness, Fender. A reunion of a legendary local group is loused up when the guitarist is murdered. A kilo of cocaine, fresh off a private plane from Mexico, is missing and before it is found the seekers have been dropping like flies.

Among the losers are two tone-deaf but greedy rock critics who had evidently grown weary of fame and wanted money. The story as story is fairly standard stuff, but the density of the colors with which Sublett paints a little-used setting makes “Rock Critic Murders” unusually interesting.

Andrew Vachss goes beyond hard-boiled to stories with the feel of granitic gravel. In Hard Candy, his fourth featuring a loner named Burke, his setting is again the gritty underside of Manhattan. Burke is backed by a freak show that suggests Doc Savage as seen through a wood-alcohol hangover. The habitat is a junkyard, with killer dog in place. The players include a mute named Max, a gent called the Prophet and a Chinese lady ever ready with ancient wisdom and hot information.

A hooker wants Burke to free her daughter from a commune that corrupts rather than saves. The daughter is happy where she is, i.e. already lost. But Burke, whose M.O. is to meet malevolence with greater malevolence, never takes refusal for an answer.

The style is terse and urgent, the narrative mostly side-of-the-mouth dialogue. Despite the backdrop of authentic urban nastiness, the goings-on are in their way as fanciful as the pulps or 007, but not less readable for all that.

By wild contrast, there is The Queen’s Head by Edward Marston, a trip back to the theater in Shakespeare’s and Queen Elizabeth’s time. Someone is out to sabotage an acting company, Lord Westfield’s Men. One of the key actors is killed in a tavern brawl, and the company manager has to find a substitute and a solution. At length, Elizabeth herself is imperiled, and only a dazzling piece of stagecraft saves her.

Marston, who lives in England, knows his period and his turf and provides a painlessly charming visit to the theatrical past.

THE HOUSE OF STAIRS, by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine (Harmony Books: $16.95; 277 pp.) SACRED MONSTER, by Donald E. Westlake (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 231 pp.) A NICE LITTLE BEACH TOWN, by E.C. Ward , (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 246 pp.) BLIND SIDE, by William Bayer (Villard: $18.95; 321 pp.) TRUCK SHOT, by Jim Stinson , (Scribner’s: $17.95; 211 pp.) ROCK CRITIC MURDERS, by Jesse Sublett , (Viking: $16.95; 225 pp.) HARD CANDY, by Andrew Vachss , (Alfred A. Knopf:$17.95; 221 pp.) THE QUEEN’S HEAD, by Edward Marston , (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 237 pp.)