Former Time and Sports Illustrated senior writer...

Former Time and Sports Illustrated senior writer Robert F. Jones has turned out one of the season’s most vividly violent items in Blood Tide (Atlantic: $18.95; 272 pp.), a tale of revenges set in some uniquely lawless islands in the Sulu Sea.

Culdee, drinking his life away after being unfairly tossed out of the Navy, and his high-spirited daughter, Miranda, who knows how to gut a 100-pound tuna with one slash of the knife, sail off from California to the Flyaway Islands (unknown to my Atlas but formidably described by Jones) to get their own back on:

1--The sailor who betrayed Culdee in a Viet Cong prison camp;

2--The rat who stole Miranda’s ketch.

What they find in the Flyaways is almost too horrible to synopsize: drug-smuggling, piracy, an insurrectionist priest inciting the natives to bloody acts in the name of freedom, a corrupt CIA overlord, who is the third in a line of Millikans (a transliteration of Americans) to lead the locals far astray.

Like a good reporter, Jones fires off volleys of facts, especially in matters nautical, leaving no Kumpit unsailed, no mainsail unstruck, or struck as the case may be. There is also a killer dog named Brillo.

Heads roll, blood flows, good men die, and bad. Jones is wonderful with action and supportive detail, whether found or invented. The characters, the good, the bad and the ugly, have slightly less reality, which makes it unnecessary to care about them, but only to let the story roll. And it does roll, and pitch and toss, with a quite breathless pace.

Tony Gibbs, who has been editor of Yachting and executive editor of The New Yorker, and who made a scintillating debut as a novelist with “Dead Run” a couple of seasons ago, has brought off the even trickier feat, a whiz-bang second novel, Running Fix (Random House: $18.95; 369 pp.).

Once again, you can almost feel sea-salt on your fingers as you turn the pages. The sense of being a-sail, in foul weather and fair, by day and by night, is so strong that it seems not so much invented as recalled. Gillian, heroine of the earlier book, is back again, in quest of a girlfriend who seemingly died in a boating tragedy on the sail home from Bermuda. She clearly didn’t die, but why, and where she has got to, and why she’s there, are the questions.

Even surer and more daring in his narrative effects, Gibbs tells his tale from shifting points of view. The book teems with action, rising to the climactic hand-to-hand struggle by night in the heaving seas. Drugs are involved, and a good man gone bad, a bad man gone worse. Gibbs’ story has what you might call, for want of a better word, amplitude, and a nice roundness of feeling for the characters and relationships that move the events.

Donald E. Westlake is the preeminent farceur among American crime novelists. His John Dortmunder is a professional burglar, not overly competent, and not, like Raffles or the other celebrated naughty heroes of the genre, a Robin Hood in disguise. Dortmunder is with the good guys only when he lacks a choice. In Drowned Hopes (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 422 pp.), Dortmunder is the reluctant co-conspirator with an ex-cellmate who has buried $700,000 in loot from an ancient crime, the loot now under 60 feet of water in a new, man-made reservoir.

The struggles to recover the loot (which is fortunately in a watertight casket) are a symphony of slapstick, and a marvel of invention by Westlake. The side-bar characters include a moist computer hacker, a dippy reservoir attendant, the malevolent ex-con, a manic lady cab driver, divers and other ladies of indifferent virtue. Westlake’s imagination is something to behold, and his ironic epilogue is pure meringue.

L. J. Washburn is a she, and she runs a bookstore in Azle, Tex., with her writer husband James Reasoner. Her second mystery, Dog Heavies (Tor Books: $17.95; 288 pp.), is a sort of mystery Western, set in the early 1920s when the West was still on the cusp between the old myths and the new realities.

Washburn’s hero, Lucas Hallam, is a former Texas Ranger and Pinkerton man now a private eye in the silent-film Hollywood. He is assigned as bodyguard-chaperone to an arrogant city actor being sent to a working ranch in Texas to learn to be (or to act convincingly like) a cowboy.

The ranch is in a heap of trouble: Rustlers are stealing the herd by the hundred-head, and the nasty local sheriff can’t even guess which way they went. The real cowboys, one in particular, don’t take to the new boy. There’s more tension than in a new barbed-wire fence. Hallam almost dies with his boots on, and the villain is quite a surprise. Washburn tells an economical, fast-gaited story, pure make-believe but with a fondness for the life and the territory that is easy to detect.

Private eyes come in every conceivable size, shape and previous condition of servitude these days. Robert Frederickson, also known as Mongo, is a dwarf, a former circus performer turned graduate criminologist (it’s Dr. Frederickson) who now runs an investigative agency with his full-sized brother. The Language of Cannibals (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 200 pp.) is author George C. Chesbro’s eighth Mongo adventure.

This time, Mongo is off to a Hudson River community where an FBI pal has been found drowned, and not by his own hand, either. The town turns out to be an ideological battleground, with far, far right-wingers in control and making life hell for some liberal ‘60s refugees, including a Baez-like folk singer running a commune and a Guthrie-like folk singer using the town as home base for worldwide tours in behalf of goodness.

Mongo, who has a way of cutting brutes down to his size, the better to beat the whey out of them, is quickly in deep trouble, especially with the hate-filled leader of the lunatic fringe. Chesbro is another amplitudinous writer who crams a lot into relatively brief space. At his most effective, he recalls John D. MacDonald in his trenchant dissertations on the (generally dismal) state of things.

But his carefully set-up characters eventually are overwhelmed by a plot that takes Ludlumite turns to include KGB assassins and massive corruption at the highest levels in Washington. Plenty of action, but of a high foolishness.

Former priest William X. Kienzle is back with a 12th mystery, starring his priest-sleuth, Father Koesler, who, in Masquerade (Andrews & McMeel: $15.95; 276 pp.), is guesting at an ecumenical crime-writers conference, featuring a rabbi who has invented a sleuthing rabbi, and so on. Highly incestuous, of course, and it seems only right that the victim should be a publisher each of the writers has reason to despise.

Kienzle, who launched the series with “The Rosary Murders” in 1979, has a nice way with characters (the good and the less good) and a useful familiarity with the fine points of the ecclesiastical life. The new book, like its predecessors, is pleasant and tasteful reading, though it has, and suffers from, a certain bloodless serenity, even when murder is being done.

Not so serene is William J. Reynolds’ The Naked Eye (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 288 pp.), fifth in a series about an Omaha private eye known only as Nebraska. He is in a tradition somewhere between Sam Spade (tough) and Lew Archer (compassionate). He can handle himself in ugly situations, but he grieves at the pain human beings cause each other even without using fists or guns.

Tracing a runaway teen-ager to Minneapolis, he stumbles into a violent enemy, drugs (which seem to have replaced all other items as the society’s token of greed) and general corruption. He goes into disguise, which I don’t recall Archer and company doing except to get information on the telephone. The ending, while not ambiguous, is shaded with both irony and melancholy, and reveals a sensitivity that has been rare in the genre since Ross Macdonald had to put down his pen.

A Los Angeles writer, Daniel Pollock, wanders far from home in Lair of the Fox (Walker: $19.95; 305 pp.), a terrorist thriller set in Turkey and the surrounding waters and islands. Kurdish freedom fighters, led by a sympathetic young zealot nicknamed the Little Fox, storm a sailing ship being used as a movie location. They seize as their principal hostage a British star who seems modeled politically on Vanessa Redgrave.

The actress gets the other hostages freed (spectacularly), then captor and captive flee, pursued by Greeks, Turks, Yanks and the film’s producer, who wants his star back. The finale, on a small, cave-pocked island, is inventive and sad. Pollock sets his thriller in an environment that he has made quite convincing and has turned out a smoothly expert first novel.

Finding new or at least unfamiliar work from an admired author long absent is a rare treat. So it is with The Return of Mr. Campion, previously uncollected stories by the late Margery Allingham, with an introduction and notes by J. E. Morpurgo (St. Martin’s Press: $15.95; 176 pp.). In truth, it is thin stuff, and not all the pieces feature the aristocratic and deceptively vague Albert Campion; indeed, one piece is not a story but the transcript of a radio talk show in which Allingham charmingly set forth Campion’s biography. Yet even the slightest of the pieces reveal Allingham as a witty, elegant and inventive writer, who, as Agatha Christie said of her, “stands out like a shining light.”

Nicolas Freeling, the English-born sometime chef who now lives in Strasbourg, is one of the most elegant of current mystery writers, creator of Piet Van der Valk, the Dutch policeman he killed off after several appearances, and Henri Castang, a French detective who is still with us. (Van der Valk is reportedly being resuscitated.)

In Not as Far as Velma (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 234 pp.), Castang, demoted to a dreary provincial posting for previous sins, must look into the disappearance of the woman who keeps a small hotel, and the strange matter of the name in the guest register of an old Jewish painter, and camp survivor, who never heard of the town or hotel.

It is a marvelous story which has Castang gingerly exploring a tangled past from a rather slippery present, in which nearly everyone has more to hide than to say. The next-to-last ending, at least, is warming, although the coda has a bittersweet taste that seems to be Freeling’s favorite flavor.

The title, an homage of sorts, is from Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely”: “You could see a long way, but not as far as Velma had gone.”