The nearest thing to a trend in...

The nearest thing to a trend in crime fiction has been the recent proliferation of books by women, starring women as sleuths working the same mean streets that Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer once had all to themselves.

One of the ablest of the new sisterhood is Chicago’s Sara Peretsky and her investigator, Victoria Iphegenia (V.I.) Warshawski. Burn Marks (Delacorte: $17.95; 340 pp.) is the sixth in the Warshawski series and, like the earlier titles, it reflects an angry response to a real social problem, bearing evidence of extensive research and an even more extensive familiarity with Chicago from ritzy suburb to rat-infested South Side alleys.

The root issue is the homeless, specifically the homeless as dispossessed by developers working in tandem with the officials they have corrupted.

An alcoholic aunt, shunned by everyone in the family except V. I., shows up at her doorstep in the small hours, driven out of her fleabag hotel by a fire. Warshawski’s attempts to find new housing for her aunt (who keeps disappearing) is a sad-funny docudrama. An insurance investigator among other things since she dropped out of the public-defender’s office, Warshawski is retained to check out the owner’s claim on the burned hotel.

The story is as active as any Marlowe ever encountered: sluggings, murders attempted, murders achieved, a very scary pursuit by night in a derelict building. Warshawski survives, narrowly, to tell the story in a sharp-tongued, sardonic first person. She’s entirely feminine but would fail most tests for gentility. She is also wonderful company and a rich discovery awaiting those who have yet to meet her. How television has missed her is not clear.

Another of the new sisterhood is Nancy Pickard, who writes about Jenny Cain, the director of a charitable foundation in a small New England city. In Bum Steer (Pocket Books: $16.95; 240 pp.), the foundation learns it will inherit a $4-million Kansas cattle ranch. Cain flies to Kansas City to meet the mysterious benefactor (unknown to her or anyone at the foundation), only to find he’s been murdered in his hospital bed.

Pickard, whose husband is a Kansas cattle-raiser, writes with easy authority about the countryside and the ranch life. No one is pleased to see Cain. The terms of the will are very odd. The executing lawyer is pompously cool. There are ex-wives and children (whose own life expectancies begin to shorten drastically) and a couple of cowhands tending to the spread. The answers to the interlocking puzzles are intricate and pleasantly surprising. The Cain series is a good deal cozier than the Warshawski, but in her lighter way, Jenny is also good company.

Ridley Pearson’s Probable Cause (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 275 pp.) is a sleek, cleverly plotted part-psychological thriller, part-courtroom drama set in Carmel. It is getting a strong push, including a reported 100,000-copy first hardcover printing, to be one of the genre’s big spring items.

James Dewitt is a former forensics expert whose wife was killed and his daughter crippled outside a courtroom by a young suspect whom Dewitt then kills.

Dewitt, now starting again as a detective on Carmel’s small force, confronts two murders disguised as suicides, one the young son of a lady politico. The killings are linked to the earlier catastrophic shoot-out, and it grows clear that the policeman whose incompetence led to the shootings and Dewitt and his children are the ultimate targets of an intricate scheme. Dewitt himself is nearly sent to trial for murder, so devilishly shrewd is the loony real villain. (The hearings, which involve the wrath of a scorned nymphomaniac, are raucously amusing.)

Pearson writes in the smooth if somewhat impersonal style of Lawrence Sanders, Robert Ludlum and other very successful commercial storytellers. And while Dewitt’s anguish as widower and worried father is amply set forth, the reader is held by the story rather than moved by the emotions, which is one definition of escapist fare.

Jim Lehrer, he who is half of the excellent McNeil-Lehrer report on PBS, was a writer first, and the 1969 movie with Peter Ustinov, “Viva Max,” was based on Lehrer’s novel of the same name. He’s now written three mysteries starring the one-eyed lieutenant-governor of Oklahoma, known only as Mack, so far as I can tell.

The newest tale, The Sooner Spy (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 210 pp.), has Mack stumbling onto a Soviet defector who has been given a new identity and is living right there in Oklahoma. Mack, splendidly inadvertent, also trips over a well-disguised Soviet agent, on the trail of the defector.

This is a comic thriller, and they’re as hard to bring off as an airy souffle and are prone to collapse at the wrong heavy touch. But Lehrer is most blessedly adroit and light-handed. His glimpses of the political process--in this context the glad-handing, soft-soaping and outright lie-telling that are the lieutenant-gov’s unsworn duties--are so amusing that the tale in all its improbabilities is a taste treat.

Mack is with all else a collector of bus-terminal memorabilia, and not above stealing to acquire the otherwise uncollectable. Lehrer, by no coincidence, is also into bus memorabilia, as revealed in a 1981 Smithsonian magazine article on his own collection and another piece in the current issue. The novel proves again that there is nothing like writing from passion and personal experience.

John Westermann is--and it’s high praise--a writing policeman in the Joseph Wambaugh tradition, a 14-year man on the Freeport, Long Island, force with decorations for bravery and excellence. Exit Wounds (Soho Press: $18.95; 288 pp.) is his second novel. The first, “High Crimes,” is just out in paper.

Like Wambaugh, Westermann knows the good cops and the spoiled cops, the toadies and the politicking commanders. He also knows the turf where the cops are more comfortable with the robbers than with the civilians. Westermann’s Orin Boyd is an almost too-familiar type, the burnt-out cop bitter over a broken marriage, verging on alcoholism and aware of it, and carrying a reputation as an unreliable maverick.

His new assignment is to discover what’s rotten in a Nassau County precinct that has become a dumping ground for misfits. What isn’t rotten? The precinct is really run by a fat racketeer who has bought off everybody worth having. The actual commanders are dumb when they’re not corrupt.

Again like some of Wambaugh’s stories, it’s an unlovely portrait, tending to the brutal, violent and ugly. Yet Boyd, visiting a dying pal at a rehab center, is established as a man of feeling who can cry as well as feel rage and who can act on his feelings to attack the corruption. The humor is, like everything else, tough, but it’s there, too.

Earl W. Emerson is an Oregon fireman who also writes about what he knows: fires and the men who fight them. Help Wanted, Orphans Preferred (William Morrow: $17.95; 288 pp.) is his seventh novel, this time about a new full-time commander at a small city volunteer fire department.

A fireman dies at a fire, but of a poisoning that could have been meant for anyone in the station house. There are attacks on other firemen. As in his earlier books, it is Emerson’s high-energy plots and his ability to convey the feel of fighting a bad fire that gives his work its high readability.

The lawyer as central figure appears in two works this month. Chester Oksner’s Burden of Proof (Knightsbridge: $18.95; 396 pp.) is essentially a courtroom drama, but, unlike most, it is a civil case at trial. The criminal activities are real enough: The villains, including a highly unpleasant pair of professional killers, run a sort of parallel course to the trial.

There’s been an accident at a nuclear-power plant on the California coast. An engineer is suing the corporation which owns the plant for damages. He was doused in radioactive water and now has lung cancer. Lucrezia Ferrara is representing the engineer, Peter Saunders. Sam Corbin, desperate for a partnership in a huge Los Angeles law firm, represents the corporation, though with ever-increasing alarm and doubts.

Oksner, formerly a practicing lawyer himself, treats himself to inside jokes (the big law firm is a virtual homonym for a well-known Los Angeles firm). The courtroom procedures and the lines of argument sound indubitably authentic, as does the unflattering portrait of life in a large law firm. But the suspense of the book is generated outside the courtroom as the corporate brass (dastards all) try to cover their tracks and the incompetent killers track their various prey. The finale, a chase across Los Angeles, is very well constructed.

Reuben Frost is a retired lawyer in his late 70s, invented by Haughton Murphy and now, in Murder Times Two (Simon & Schuster: $17.95; 284 pp.), making his fifth appearance. This is a mystery in an older tradition: unpleasantnesses among the very rich, with heels on marble and the swish of designer silk gowns among the sound effects. A thoroughly dislikable rich drunk is poisoned at a party in his own house, creating all manner of testamentary confusions.

Frost, present at the dinner party, is briefly a suspect, thanks partly to a lapse of memory (a nice touch). But he has highly placed friends in the city and the police department and is able to solve the crime with an unruffled urbanity that even William Powell could not fault.

Santa Barbara’s Dennis Lynds, writing as Michael Collins, has done several stories about a one-armed private eye named Dan Fortune, who looks into greed- driven or revenge-motivated doings in Santa Barbara itself.

In Chasing Eights (Donald I. Fine: $18.95; 249 pp.), Fortune is asked by a wife to check up on her husband, who’s been playing around with the family’s small savings. He’s a car salesman who lurches from one impossible scheme to another, this time a shady condo-development deal with his boss and a barrio sharpie.

Collins expertly crowds his events into a few frantic overnight hours, the husband on the lam, two out-of-town enforcers looking for him, the body count rising.

Fortune is less introspective than Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, the prototypal Santa Barbara operative, but Collins has much the same affectionate sensitivity to the city’s unique look, diversities and unifying ambience.