Mystery Writers Find Readers Still Enthused at Crime’s Ways : Awards: Organization presents its Edgars to a wide range of works, including a musical. And new women writers expand the ranks of puzzle makers.

The Mystery Writers of America, formed in 1945, is the senior organization of crime writers in this country. Its annual Edgar awards (named, of course, for Edgar Allan Poe, who is generally saluted as the founding father of the form) are the most prestigious in the field.

The 1990 awards, presented at a formal banquet last week at the start of a three-day ingathering of mystery authors, editors and publishers, confirmed the range of work that falls under the umbrella of “mystery,” from a Broadway musical to traditional puzzles and hard-edged works heavy on social realism rather than arsenic at the vicarage. The prevailing tone was a cheerful feeling that the public’s appetite for mystery in all its guises is healthy.

The evidence includes the frequent appearance of mystery writers on the best-seller lists: P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Tony Hillerman, Mary Higgins Clark, Dick Francis, Joseph Wambaugh and others whose works are technically thrillers rather than mysteries.

The ongoing popularity of “Murder, She Wrote” and the “Mystery” series on PBS is also heartening to the mystery trade. The committee that chose the Edgar for best mystery motion picture deliberated among 51 titles (some candidates indubitably far-fetched). The numbers in other categories were equally impressive: 75 candidates for best first mystery novel, 220 entries for best novel, 60 young adult mysteries, more than 600 short stories.

The Edgar for best novel went to James Lee Burke for his “Black Cherry Blues,” set partly in Louisiana, where Burke has lived, and partly in Montana, where Burke now lives. It features his series character, a former New Orleans cop named Dave Robicheaux, who first appeared in “The Neon Rain.”

Burke, a one-time Los Angeles Skid Row social worker, writes with poetic intensity about a very real and often ugly world. His stories develop a double suspense because Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic whose struggles to stay dry despite the tensions and frustrations of the case at hand are painful but heartening.

Burke has also written four non-mystery novels and his short stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review and other literary journals. His work reflects one strain of present mystery writing, toughly realistic but compassionate, entertaining in the hard-edge tradition but qualifying as a work of social history.

Men outnumbered women among the winners, yet it seems significant that three of the five nominees for best first mystery novel were women, including Los Angeles’ Melodie Johnson Howe, a former Universal contract player whose “The Mother Shadow” was very well reviewed. The winner was “The Last Billable Hour” by Susan Wolfe.

If there is a significant trend in the mystery field, it is the increasing frequency and popularity of mysteries by women, with women as protagonists, like Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone, taking over Ross Macdonald’s Santa Barbara beat, and Sara Peretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, finding crime and social problems going hand in hand in Chicago.

Recent surveys have suggested that perhaps one published mystery in four is written by a woman. Yet the ratio seems deceptive, probably because women historically and today have been disproportionately successful in the field, from the days of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham in England, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Mignon Eberhart and several others in this country.

This is Christie’s centenary year--she was born in 1890 and died in 1976--and there will be elaborate observances in England and elsewhere. Her 84 books continue to sell in innumerable languages and to find new audiences.

Christie’s grandson, Matthew Pritchard, who oversees the ongoing sales and productions of her work, was an honored guest at the awards banquet and at a 90-minute seminar Saturday on the durability of Christie’s work.

She was, the panelists agreed, an unparalleled puzzle maker, especially ingenious at diverting the reader’s eye from the culprit yet making the ultimate revelation inevitable rather than arbitrary. As one of the panelists said, the reader’s reaction is most often: “Fooled again, but fairly.”

It is a kind of conjuring trick, and Pritchard noted that his grandmother was fascinated by magic tricks and in fact briefly employed a butler whose gifts included performing magic.

The question often asked at gatherings of mystery writers and readers is why the form should have such a continuing and evidently growing popularity. Prof. B. J. Rahn of Hunter College, an expert on P. D. James, Ruth Rendell and other English writers, thinks that the charm of the mystery is that restores order after chaos, in a world that sometimes appears increasingly chaotic. It also metes out justice in a world where justice is not always seen to be done.

The traditional puzzle mystery was escapist fare, ideal for train rides, hammocks and sleepless nights. Yet even the escapist fare, Rahn says, reflected its times. Christie’s characters, said Mary Higgins Clark, who chaired the seminar, were not stereotypes but prototypes, and they reveal the times Christie lived in and the places she knew, from English villages to archeological digs where she spent a month each summer with her husband Max Mallowan.

What Edgar Allan Poe began, Arthur Conan Doyle and Christie made a worldwide industry.

The other Edgar winners included Jack Olsen’s “Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lowell,” as best fact crime book. Norman Sherry’s “The Life of Graham Green, Volume I: 1904-1939” was the best critical or biographical study. The Larry Gelbart/Cy Coleman/David Zippel musical “City of Angels,” won an Edgar as best mystery play. (It was also the only nomination.)

Keith Peterson’s “The Rain” was chosen the best paperback original mystery. Surprisingly, the Edgar for best motion picture went to “Heathers,” a blackish, brackish comedy thriller about murderous and suicidal games among high schoolers. The runners-up were Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Sea of Love,” “True Believer” and “Licence to Kill,” the most recent James Bond.

A special Raven award went to Carol Brener, for her tenure as owner of the pioneering Manhattan mystery book shop, Murder, Ink.

The Mystery Writer’s Grand Master award for an entire body of work went this year to Helen McCloy, now 86, who published her first mystery in 1938.