Mystery writers are nothing if not prolific....

Mystery writers are nothing if not prolific. Longshot (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 320 pp.) is the 30th book by Dick Francis and his 28th thriller in 28 years, a line that began with “Dead Cert” in 1962. The format varies little: A youngish man, usually but not always single, suffers great danger and often severe pain and torture in his frequently inadvertent entanglement in a plot involving horses. (Francis once explained that he changed heroes each time because introducing the new man gave him 20 to 30 pages of material.)

The miracle is that the formula has worked so well so often, and “Longshot” is one of his best.

John Kendall writes guidebooks on how to survive various wilderness perils. (From the start you can guess what’s coming.) He is temporarily between royalties and takes a commission to do a biography of an imperious horse trainer, which keeps Francis on course, so to speak. Kendall never has ridden, which represents a nice change in the usual proceedings.

There are complications immediately: jealous riders, one bordering on the malevolent; family tensions; a missing stablegirl found dead; a fiendishly clever assault on the life of Kendall himself, who is subsequently wounded by an arrow and left for dead, hoist by his own survival literature.

Francis offers two of those major set-pieces of sustained narrative of survival against odds that are his specialty and that no one does better. All his characters, friend and foe alike, are sharply portrayed. The owner’s eccentric but sympathetic teen-aged son is a particularly good invention. The motivations to crime are credible and not arbitrary.

James Lee Burke has emerged as one of the very best American crime writers. His “Black Cherry Blues” won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award as the best crime novel of 1989. A Morning for Flamingos (Little, Brown: $18.95; 294 pp.) may be even better, a poetically expressed merging of melodramatic events and sensitive problems of character and relationship.

Burke’s continuing protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, is a New Orleans plainclothes detective who is also a recovering alcoholic. He and a partner are escorting two prisoners to the state penitentiary to be executed. One is a vicious killer named Jimmie Lee Boggs, the other a young black, Tee Beau Latiolais. Robicheaux knows the boy’s grandmother, who swears he’s innocent.

Boggs engineers an escape, wounding Robicheaux badly and taking the boy with him. Later, Robicheaux, bent on revenge, agrees to infiltrate a Mafia gang as the embittered ex-cop he is. Boggs is a hit man for the gang. The paths converge, but unpredictably. Like Robicheaux, the gang boss is a Vietnam veteran, and there is an ironic kinship of a shared bitterness. Robicheaux’s interior battle is with his own fears and his loss of self-esteem.

The quality of the prose in which a crime story is told is not inevitably a part of the lure of the form. Strong plots will survive the most lumpish language. But the pleasure of reading Burke’s prose is immense, and his evocations of place, atmosphere and especially the interior states of the remarkable Robicheaux are not to be dismissed as mere genre writing.

Jonathan Kellerman, trained as a child psychologist and author of books in the field, logically enough created as his crime-series protagonist a child psychologist, Alex Delaware, who like Kellerman lives and works in Southern California. His link to crime cases usually is Detective Milo Sturgis, who is black and gay and who may, in the new Delaware, Time Bomb (Bantam: $19.95; 468 pp.), have ended his career on the force with a deeply satisfying right cross to the chin of a smug and smarmy racist superior.

A young woman, armed with a rifle and apparently intending to assassinate a local politician during a visit to an elementary school, is instead shot dead by a handy policemen as she hides in an outbuilding on the school grounds. Delaware, called in to handle and calm the children’s fears, finds that nothing is at it seems.

No one quite believes that the girl, an eccentric loner as she was, was capable of murder. The politician sends a peculiar con-man psychologist to tend the children, despite Delaware’s presence. The attractive woman who is the school principal is under pressure and then endangered.

The girl’s death proves to be the sore point of a large and nasty conspiracy of right-wing racism and sexual and political corruption. Kellerman gives full value in vivid confrontations, violence, romance and a reaffirmation of traditional values of fairness and justice. His previous book, “Silent Partner,” was a best-seller, and it’s fair and just to suspect that this expert thriller will be, too.

The best novel winner at this year’s Bouchercon meeting in London was Sarah Caudwell’s The Sirens Sang of Murder, whose softcover edition has just been published here (Dell: $3.95; 277 pp.). Caudwell is a London barrister, now writing full-time. Her urbane style is very much in the tradition of Michael Innes and Nicholas Blake, and the novelty is that it is never clear whether her protagonist, an Oxford don ambiguously named Hilary Tamar, is male or female.

The foreground figures all are tax lawyers, including a Wooster-like figure named Cantrip who goes off to a Channel Island on a case and encounters murder and other unpleasantnesses, which he delineates in amusing Telexes to the home office. Amusing is, I think, the word.

Sniper’s Moon (Bantam: $18.95; 370 pp.) is a strong first novel by Carsten Stroud. Not surprisingly, it has been optioned for a movie, to which its hard- driving and violent plot commends it. Stroud’s man, Frank Keough, is a professional sniper with the NYPD. The work is getting to him; his life is a shambles and then somebody begins zeroing in on him. He is finally a pariah on and off the force, a Hitchcockian innocent (very relatively speaking) trying to figure out what’s happening, the ultimate clues residing with his estranged father, a retired detective. It’s a powerful police procedural by a man who knows the force.

Another excellent first novel is The Last Frame (Carroll & Graf: $16.95; 211 pp.) by Jim Wright, a New Jersey newspaper editor. His rumpled hero is modelled on--and the book written in memory of--Arthur (Weegee) Fellig, Wright says. Weegee, wandering Manhattan with a police radio and a Speed Graphic, captured a harsh portrait of a city’s violent deaths and sad losers. Wright’s Will Carver also is a death-chasing loner who himself begins to be chased by death when he buys a used camera (his own are often in pawn) containing a blackmailer’s film. Wright obviously knows photography, photographers, crime, the police and Manhattan, and he tells a breathless, nonstop tale about an oddly likable eccentric who is a born survivor.

Talk about plot triumphing over prose. Kyotaro Nishimura is a Japanese crime writer specializing in what might be called railway procedures, stories about trains and travel. The Mystery Train Disappears (Dembner/Norton: $16,95; 246 pp.), as translated by Gavin Frew, is flatly written, I suspect reflecting the original. Mystery trains, presumably popular in Japan, offer the customers an undisclosed destination, rather than a crime en route. This one disappears with 400 passengers aboard, a neat trick in any week. A billion yen in ransom is paid, but the crooks seem one step ahead of the police and the railway officials at every junction.

Nishimura’s story does rocket along, and for once a mystery really is a mystery. How, you ask, could it be done, and Nishimura, who knows his sidings and his abandoned stations, shows you.