OK, the sun-block has been put away...

OK, the sun-block has been put away for another year and it’s time to turn one’s attention to the less frivolous novels of fall. Less frivolous? Maybe yes, maybe no, but it’s a mixed bag nonetheless. If “frivolous” translates as “delightful,” for instance, then Warren Kiefer’s sprawling character study of 90-year-old Lee Garland in Outlaw (Donald I. Fine: $19.95; 517 pp.) wins, hands down. Orphaned at about age 5 when marauding Apaches slaughtered his parents in New Mexico and reared by a Mexican family, young Garland cuts a swath through the Southwest like you wouldn’t believe--as rustler, wildcatter, Cuban rough rider with Teddy Roosevelt, ambassador to Mexico, lover and successful banker. Garland does it all with an infectious flair that makes him one of the most delightful protagonists in recent memory. Here is a grizzled, cud-chewing, semi-literate old coot of high principles looking back--with total recall--at a colorful life crisscrossed with both fictional and real-life heroes, scoundrels, scalawags and ne’er-do-wells--and who loved every minute of it. Kiefer, with three previous novels under his belt, has a real sleeper here in this delightful story of a thoroughly delightful man shaped out of the rough clay of New Mexico. You’ll love him.

And, Glory be! Finally a “feminist” novel comes along in Ruth Harris’s excellent novel, Modern Women (St. Martin’s Press: $18.95; 439 pp.) that avoids the “eat ‘em alive,” “I’ll-claw-my-way-over-any-man’s-back-to-get-what-I-want” stridency so prevalent today. Here we have three thoroughly believable and likable women from wildly divergent backgrounds “making their way,” as popular fiction tags it, through the struggle for sexual equality that began, roughly, with John F. Kennedy’s assassination in ’63. Through the eyes of Elly, Jane and Lincky (short for Lincoln--her parents wanted a boy that badly) this is the story of the emancipation of today’s woman. All began their careers in New York City at about the same time . . . they have their love affairs, their marriages . . . and their paths cross and recross. This is a thoroughly delightful tale of what is was like to be young, ambitious and in love during an exciting period of history. Harris has captured the mood, the flavor and the excitement of the ‘60s and ‘70s beautifully.

When Los Angeles clinical psychologist Jonathan Kellerman turned his considerable skills to the suspense novel a short four years ago with “When the Bough Breaks,” he also created a likable and credible protagonist in Dr. Alex Delaware who has developed an understandably wide following.

Kellerman’s latest, Silent Partner (Bantam Books: $18.95; 416 pp.) brings Delaware to the front again in a complex and haunting story of tangled personalities, deeply buried family secrets and of violence lying thinly under the surface of people seemingly immune to such passions. No longer a detached observer of what quirky and deadly behavior old traumas can create, Delaware in “Silent Partner” is up to his eyebrows, personally, in this one as he carries a guilt complex of monumental proportions around his neck. Who wouldn’t when an old love seeks your help at a cocktail party, you politely decline and, the next day, she’s dead? As always, Kellerman’s familiarity with Los Angeles brings the city to throbbing life and his deft touch with characterization extends even to minor characters with walk-on roles. There’s a bit with a gay, retired cop dying of AIDS that hits the reader right between the eyes. The mystery behind his ex-lover’s death is a twisty path--leading to a wealthy, elderly couple with one of the world’s most extensive pornography collections, to a retarded farm couple living in a corrugated lean-to, but with a steady monthly income, to a reclusive billionaire still meddling in lives from beyond the grave.

But to novelist Lucian K. Truscott IV, a West Point graduate subsequently discharged from the service for refusing to withdraw a controversial article on drug use in the Army from publication, the best revenge is to give the regular Army brass one screaming fit after another. The Pentagon, for instance, isn’t going to like his latest effort, Army Blue (Crown Publishers: $19.95; 436 pp.) one tad better than it did his first--”Dress Gray,” a damning novel built around the attempts of the administration of West Point to cover up a homosexual murder, and which subsequently was turned into a television miniseries. Get a good grip on your epaulets, boys, because “Army Blue” does a similar gutting job on the Army’s behavior in Vietnam. Here we have young career officer, Lt. Matthew Blue, on trial for his life before a court martial for cowardice and desertion in the face of the enemy. His biggest ace in the hole: his grandfather, a retired Army general and a hero of World War II, and his father, a colonel and a Korean veteran. Unfortunately, father and grandfather have been estranged for years but now, suddenly, they have to lay aside their old animosities and fly halfway around the world to save their progeny from the hangman’s noose. But, in steamy Vietnam, their combined clout with the military runs, headlong, into the dirty, political realities of the Army’s involvement there. Was the boy framed? If so, how? and by whom? More important: Why? It’s a gripping story as the two fuming old warriors try to rip the veil of secrecy off a scandal that the Army is just as determined to keep in place. “Army Blue” is a Literary Guild selection.

For a wild change of pace, though, try Carl Hiaasen’s Skin Tight (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 320 pp.)--not political or military skullduggery in high places, but good old murderous skullduggery in low places. Author Hiaasen has a wildly comedic touch in this fast-paced--and frequently ultra-violent--story of how Mick Stranahan, a former Florida state investigator, gets pulled, vehemently against his will, into an old murder case that is being reopened. Now retired to a stilt house in the tidelands outside Miami--complete to a “watch dog” in the form of a barracuda living under it--Stranahan has the same sort of high principles that always made the late John D. McDonald’s protagonist, Travis McGee, so appealing. But this is a far more lethal version of McGee as Stranahan finds himself pulled into a conspiracy that pits him against a high-society plastic surgeon who shouldn’t be permitted to remove teen-age zits, an equally unprincipled TV trash “journalist,” and a gigantic hit man so grotesque that he makes “Nightmare on Elm Street’s” Freddy Krueger look like a beauty pageant finalist. Never mind the gore, of which there is an abundance, the rollicking, off-the-wall sense of humor that runs rough-shod through “Skin Tight” more than saves the day. It is an alternate selection of both the Literary Guild and the Mystery Guild and an alternate selection, too, of the Doubleday Book Club.

Don’t be put off by the title of Robert K. Tanenbaum’s second novel featuring feisty Roger Karp, an assistant New York City district attorney. While Depraved Indifference (NAL Books: $18.95; 297 pp.) sounds a little bit like overkill in the hyperbole department it is actually a legal term that carries “reckless endangerment” to new heights. Poor Karp, he’s not only facing the prosecution of a murder, occurring when a bomb planted by a band of inept terrorist-hijackers kills a New York City cop, but his hands are continually tied by his own boss, the New York Police Department and even the FBI. And why on Earth are the terrorists’ legal fees being covered by the Archdiocese of New York? With his only reliable help coming from his zesty colleague and lover, Marlene Ciampi--no stranger, herself, to disfiguring bomb blasts--Karp has the frustrating task of trying to determine not only who is trying to protect the terrorists but, more important, why. Novelist Tanenbaum knows the workings of the N.Y. D.A.’s office like the back of his hand--he was formerly on the staff there and introduced Roger Karp in an earlier novel, “No Lesser Plea.” He is now in a no-less high- pressure job as mayor of our own Beverly Hills.