Raymond Chandler died in 1959, leaving behind...

Raymond Chandler died in 1959, leaving behind four chapters of a Philip Marlowe novel he had tentatively titled “Poodle Springs” (for which read Palm Springs).

Marlowe, married just over three weeks to Linda, a woman he loves very much despite her millions, is settling into Palm Springs, looking for a cheap office from which to do his private eyeing, and intending to stay his own man, financially and otherwise.

In the four brisk chapters, Chandler established a lively but foreboding dialogue between Marlowe and Linda about her money and confronted Marlowe with unfriendly cops, a sleazy nightclub owner who needs his services, and two junior-league hoods Marlowe easily outfaces.

Robert B. Parker, whose own private investigator Spenser is right out of the Marlowe tradition, has finished Poodle Springs (Putnam’s, $18.95, 288 pp.), building on the meager plot hints Chandler left.

The join, as they say, is seamless. On the limited evidence he provided, Chandler, in first draft at least, had moved to a faster, sparer style, stripped of the fancy verbal footwork--those razzle-dazzle images--that mark “Farewell My Lovely” and the other Chandler classics. The later style is, conveniently, closer to Parker’s.

Parker’s plot involves hidden identities and convoluted relationships. A photographer is not what he seems. There is a large gambling debt at issue, plus a couple of murders and assorted pummelings. It’s not all hard-edge and there are glimpses of heartfelt and doomed associations that are quite affecting.

The story floats free in time, probably nearer to Chandler’s era than to Parker’s, but curiously unfixed and abstract. “Poodle Springs” lacks the sense Chandler’s own works have (and indeed Parker’s Spenser novels as well) that they place fictional events before a real-as-rust backdrop of present time.

It is a skilled and entertaining work, although the disintegration of the marriage (a casualty of stubborn stupidity on both sides) gives those exchanges in the book the sour taste of an unventilated room.

James Lee Burke is one of the ablest crime novelists of the day, a remarkable combination of poetic sensibility and hard-muscled storyteller. He follows his excellent “The Neon Rain” and “Heaven’s Prisoners” with Black Cherry Blues (Little, Brown, $17.95, 290 pp.), in which ex-cop Dave Robicheaux leaves his bayou bait shop, reluctantly, to pursue troubles around the oil rigs and Indian reservations of Montana.

Burke, a one-time oil worker who lives in Montana when he’s not teaching writing at Wichita State, builds a terrific story (frame-ups, an undiscovered murder, thugs, second-echelon Mafiosi). The plot crackles with events and suspense.

Yet Robicheaux’s internal states--his struggles as a recovering alcoholic to stay dry, his memories of Vietnam and of the murder of his wife and the death of his father, his responsibility to a Salvadoran child he once rescued from a plane crash--are presented with such intensity as to become very nearly a parallel novel within the thriller. Burke is not to be missed.

Kingsley Amis, author of “Lucky Jim” and a literary jack-of-all-trades who has tried his hand at almost everything--science fiction, a James Bond pastiche, a crime novel in the period tradition (“The Riverside Villa Murders”)--was asked in 1975 to write for a newspaper a mystery serial in six chapters.

The Crime of the Century now appears in book form for the first time (Mysterious Press, $16.95, 162 pp.). After the first five installments, readers were invited to submit their own solutions. The winner is included in the book, right after Amis’ own, quite different solution. Amis also contributes a new introduction, explaining why this minor five-finger exercise appealed to him.

One of the principals in the story is a mystery writer, sweating over a book whose events are rather like the “real” events of the story, to wit, a series of schematic murders intended to lead to a major political assassination. The suspects are members of a select committee purportedly investigating the murders.

It is all as calculatedly unreal as mysteries ever get, the plotting so porous as to invite those alternate denouements, the whole thing a minor but urbane historical curiosity.

After dallying with a series starring an investigative widow and writing a couple of very clever straight psychological studies, Simon Brett returns to his durable series character, the hard-drinking and generally out-of-work actor Charles Paris.

In A Series of Murders (Scribner’s, $16.95, 214 pp.), Paris appears to have found steady work, playing a dumb village constable in a television series featuring a supersleuth who is a kind of down-market Peter Wimsey.

The ingenue in the cast is bashed over the head, the ultimate review of her lousy acting; the assistant stage manager is done in on location, evidently for knowing more than was good for him.

Between colossal consumptions of Bell’s Scotch, Paris deciphers the truth (mostly a matter of sweeping aside several red herrings). But the series looks to be a disaster, and poor plastered Paris will be a disaster and Paris at liberty again.

Paris’ drinking gets heavier right along, and has grown counterproductive for himself and, I think, the author’s intentions. The boozing, for so souffle-like a series, has become unattractive, not merely melancholy like Charles’ inability to reconcile with the wife he loves.

What gives the series its continuing appeal is Brett’s eye and ear for the world of acting (in any medium). A writer for television in his earlier career, Brett knows the posings and the rancors. But Paris by now needs to be a bit less of a loser.

Curiously, two of the month’s detective tales involve murder by ritual hangings. In Stephen Murray’s The Noose of Time (St. Martin’s, $15.95, 159 pp.), the victim is the newest teacher at a boy’s school, an arrogant and not widely liked boaster. Suspects include a girl student with whom he’s had an affair, one or more of his fellow teachers, even his quirky half-sister. Alec Stainton, a rather featureless detective inspector, must sort it out.

The solution, involving a convenient revelation from the past, is tidy but belated, and the writing does not soar much beyond competent.

The hangee of Susan Dunlap’s Pious Deception (Villard, $16.95, 209 pp.) is a young Catholic priest whose unprincipled bishop hires private eye Kiernan O’Shaughnessy to prove he didn’t commit suicide, so he can be buried in consecrated ground.

There was clearly more to the padre than met the eye, and none of it is attractive. As for the bishop, it’s hard to believe he ever said his prayers. The suspicion presents itself that the author may be settling an old score or two.

The setting is Phoenix and the mountains nearby, where there are, among other items, a shelter for abused women, a weird hideaway home, an enclave of rifle-toting rebel Catholics, a shale-oil plant and a site for a mammoth retreat-monastery.

There is plenty of action. O’Shaughnessy gets knocked about a good deal and the climactic chase during a mountain cloudburst is fine, sustained action. Yet there is something over-cluttered about the plot, a few too many cross-purposes, and Dunlap does not yet succeed in making O’Shaughnessy appealing as well as tough.

A logo new to me, Brown Bag Mysteries from Council Oak Books, offers an interesting and handy format: paperback-sized but hard-covered, like the old Everyman classics from college days.

The Mark Twain Murders by Edie Skom (Council Oaks Books, Tulsa, $12.95, 278 pp.) is a campus novel, set mainly in the library of a university suspiciously like Northwestern, where Skom teaches.

Beth Austin is an English teacher who encounters evidence that a gifted graduate student may have committed plagiarism, but the girl turns up dead before she can confirm or deny. Despite elaborate security measures, it also appears that alarming numbers of rare books have been disappearing from the shelves and the library.

The deadly doings, including a killer’s pursuit of Austin through the dark, deserted library, don’t seriously dent the author’s quite cheerful verve. She leaves no doubt of her passionate love of books and libraries, and readers similarly impassioned may find “The Mark Twain Murders” leaves them Dewey-eyed.

The body in the library is a genre within the crime genre. There is another genre which could be called the lethal fantastic, verging on the preposterous and supplied by writers like Richard Condon, Elmore Leonard, Ross Thomas and a few others. The select group can now admit, on at least a provisional basis, Carl Hiaasen, a columnist for the Miami Herald.

His third thriller, Skin Tight (Putnam’s, $18.95, 320 pp.), sets off with our hero dispatching a hit man by puncturing him permanently with a stuffed marlin. The hit man had eluded the semitrained barracuda the hero keeps beneath his stilted house on the water south of Miami.

The book just builds from there, at last embracing, among other delights, a plastic surgeon whose hands shake uncontrollably and a hideously ugly killer who uses a murderously effective weed-whip as a prosthesis in lieu of his missing hand.

Seldom have the losers been so imaginatively done in, seldom have events moved quite so fast through a Miami that, in its kaleidoscopic squalor, seems as real as a news story.

The hero is Mick Stranahan, who has no wish to be a hero, only to be let alone. The plot is not so much a plot as a working out of the thesis that old crimes never die, and they don’t fade away either.