The crisp nights of fall are on...

The crisp nights of fall are on us, and there’s a hunger for an equal amount of tang in our reading fare--variety, a mix of high adventure, romance and intrigue. And the popular fiction hitting the market next month is tailor-made for it.

How about another fascinating journey back in time in the skilled hands of George Garrett, our resident expert on Elizabethan history? An old hand in such matters, Garrett’s earlier works included “Death of the Fox,” a riveting novel built around the life of Sir Walter Raleigh, and “The Succession,” which re-created the events surrounding the succession of James I to the throne of Queen Elizabeth.

In his latest foray into the gusty world of the now-aging monarch, Entered From the Sun (Doubleday: $19.95; 368 pp.), Garrett reopens one of the most intriguing and durable mysteries of that era: the events surrounding the death of Christopher Marlowe, poet, and, in the eyes of many, England’s second greatest playwright--cut down at age 29 at the height of his career in a barroom brawl that was as shrouded with unanswered questions then as it is today. Given the opportunity to achieve full maturity, would Marlowe’s talents have overshadowed Shakespeare’s--an upstart who wasn’t even published until the year of Marlowe’s death in 1593? We’ll never know.

In “Entered From the Sun,” Garrett gives us two wildly disparate protagonists, Capt. William Barfoot and Joseph Hunnyman who, quite independently of each other, are on a common mission: Both have been hired by political groups to reopen the events surrounding Marlowe’s death four years earlier. For entirely different reasons, the self-defense acquittal of Marlowe’s killer, Ingram Frizer, leaves both groups dissatisfied.

These men are night and day: Barfoot, a battle-scarred military veteran with a source of income that remains mysterious but who is a man you definitely wouldn’t want to meet in a darkened alley, is a no-nonsense, dangerous man with a long history of undercover intelligence work; Hunnyman, in sharp contrast, is a comely actor and opportunist who has been playing the theatrical circuit on village greens since, as a pre-pubescent (as was the custom of the time), he played the role of women on stage.

Living by his wits, and the kindness of ladies attracted to his extraordinary good looks, Hunnyman seems ill-matched against the formidable Barfoot except for one major asset: He knows, intimately, the theatrical circle in which Marlowe moved.

The catalyst here is the lovely Alysoun, the shrewd village girl who has managed to get herself wed to an aging printer catering to the theatrical trade. By the time the printer has conveniently died, Alysoun has managed to learn his craft well and has become, herself, the leading London purveyor of the folios, pamphlets and tracts produced by the Elizabethan artists.

Alysoun needs Hunnyman as a distributor for her work outside London--and for more earthy reasons. Hunnyman needs Alysoun both for his investigative work and for the same earthy reasons. Barfoot needs Alysoun because of a presumably damning pamphlet she inherited from her husband tying Barfoot in with Papal underground activities.

This is a sprightly, deft narrative in which you can smell and feel the rambunctious London of the 1590s with all of its bawdiness and its endless political and religious intrigues. Was Marlowe, indeed, murdered in cold blood? If so, whose hand was behind it? Garrett is a tireless historic researcher and, in Marlowe, he’s picked a bigger-than-life subject: a man who was, indeed, heavily involved in the British Intelligence service to the extent that the Queen’s Privy Council (for unspecified services to the Crown) intervened in his behalf to obtain for him his master’s degree from Cambridge.

In Hunnyman and Barfoot, Garrett has created two swashbuckling and unforgettable post-mortem private eyes moving skillfully through the back roads of 16th-Century London that each knows so well.

In a fast-forward in time, we now go to contemporary, backwoods Georgia for another of Anne Rivers Siddons’ perceptive insights into the Southern mind-set. Her latest, King’s Oak (Harper & Row: $19.95; 576 pp.), is a worthy and highly readable follow-up to last year’s well-received “Peachtree Road.”

Here we have Diana (Andy) Calhoun and her 8-year-old daughter Hilary--each on her distinctive rebound from one of those story-book romances and weddings that has gone wildly awry: Andy’s marriage to a socially prominent young doctor who turns out to be both on drugs and is a closet wife-beater. Licking their collective wounds, Andy and Hilary, under the guidance of one of Andy’s old college roommates, settle down in a cozy house in the woods near the small town of Pemberton, where Andy obtains public-relations work with a small junior college.

Romance comes, first in the person of Pemberton’s widower lawyer, then more seriously in the form of Tom Dabney, a true romantic who teaches English lit at the college. But if you think this apparently idyllic situation is going to remain in place, you don’t know author Siddons’ skill in turning over narrative rocks--in this case uncovering a Pemberton that has a far darker side than the surface appearance of Old-World Southern gentility built around the country-club set.

On an edge of the same romantic forest that Andy and Hilary inhabit is the town’s real pride: a new nuclear plant that is hailed nationally as the model by which all such installations should be judged. But then strange things happen--blue flashing lights in the waters of the creek; baby deer dying oddly, with deformities, and strange tales of weird rites (in which romantic interest Tom figures prominently) going on deep in the woods bordering the swamp.

Through it all, Siddons, as usual, peppers her gripping story with odd-ball characters--the inbred, courtly Southerners who live on the right side of the tracks, and the equally bizarre, equally inbred blue-collar types servicing the plant and living on the wrong side. It’s a multilayered, multifaceted novel of off-beat characters caught up in conflicting cultures, a novel that defies you to put it down.

Less subtle intrigue is the name of the game in William D. Pease’s first novel, Playing the Dozens (Viking: $19.95; 355 pp.). A seasoned federal prosecutor in Washington, the author knows the seamy side of the nation’s capitol all too well and he uses that knowledge to good advantage in this complex story of murder, drug dealings, money laundering and double-crosses.

The story begins, routinely enough, with the apparently random barroom shooting of a D.C. cop. Simple enough on the surface, the case quickly envelopes assistant U.S. Dist. Atty. Michael Holden in a labyrinth of skullduggery in high places--a prosperous undertaker with influence that reaches into the D.A.’s office itself; blackmail; numbered bank accounts; strange connections with political forces in the Virgin Islands; a high-fashion assistant to the undertaker who has a fine sense of double-entry bookkeeping and her own power bases.

Questions tumble on questions: Why is the cop-killer himself dispatched in a supposedly impenetrable jail cell? Who is the mysterious “Governor” who seemingly calls the tune for most of the evildoing? To what use is the drug money being put in the idyllic Virgin Islands?

Growing increasingly cynical, especially after his long-time lover, Katy, herself becomes a target of the laundering crew, Holden can, perhaps, be forgiven for trying to cut himself a piece of the action.

Author Pease has a nice touch with both characterization and dialogue; the curious title, “Playing the Dozens,” is a quote from John le Carre’s “The Honorable Schoolboy” and would seem to translate as being jerked around. “