The King of Crime in the Suites : TWILIGHT AT MAC’S PLACE <i> By Ross Thomas (Mysterious Press: $19.95; 320 pp.) </i>

Anyone reading a Ross Thomas thriller for the first time is in imminent danger of addiction: One taste is never enough. His books ought to come with a health warning: Prolonged exposure to this page-turning prose can lead to nervousness, loss of sleep and antisocial behavior.

Critics, fellow suspense writers and his passionate fans have been singing Thomas’ praises for more than 20 years, with an ever-rising sense of frustration and injustice: How can it be that a writer so blissfully entertaining isn’t a staple of the best-seller lists? (The question itself has become a Ross Thomas cliche.) Each new book--and this is No. 23--is expected to be the “breakthrough” that will put him in the magic circle with the Elmore Leonards and Robert Ludlums and John Le Carres. Though Thomas is a steady seller--and anybody who’s been profiled in People magazine can no longer be considered an obscure cult writer--a stylist who is this deft ought to be a household word.

The fact that Thomas often is mentioned with Leonard is wildly misleading. Leonard works the streets, writing about crime in low places. Thomas writes about crime in high places. He’s the most worldly of thriller writers, equally at home with a Central American dictator, a Washington labor leader, the madam of a Shanghai bordello or, in his new book “Twilight at Mac’s Place,” the inner offices at Langley.

The Thomas tone--funny, urbane, politically savvy--exudes a bouncy disenchantment. One of the characters in his new book is described as having a look of “semi-devout fatalism . . . acquired only by those who at some risk have peered into the human abyss and aren’t at all reassured by what they’ve seen.” That could go for Thomas as well, but as that quote suggests, not far beneath the jolly cynic lurks a disappointed romantic.

Not for nothing did E. J. Dionne, the New York Times reporter, describe Thomas as a “Humphrey Bogart liberal.” The wonderful, hard-drinking rogues who populate his adventures have been around the block too many times to be paragons of virtue; they’re willing to play as dirty as the really bad guys. Yet sooner or later their dormant idealism--usually expressed by their contempt for official cant--peeks out from behind the protective shell.

Thomas’ blithe fatalism isn’t just literary attitude. What gives it authority--and makes his books so damn much fun to read--is Thomas’ insider’s familiarity with the corridors of power. Whether he’s writing about corruption in Southern California (“Chinaman’s Chance,” arguably his best book), oil and arms in Libya (“The Mordida Man”), labor unions (“The Porkchoppers”), African tribal politics (“The Seersucker Whipsaw”) or that wonderful Shanghai bordello (“The Fools in Town Are on Our Side”), Thomas gives you the impression that he’s been behind the closed doors where the deals get made, the palms are greased, the cover-ups are arranged.

His characters may have fanciful names like Lucifer Dye and Velveeta Keats and Otherguy Overby, and they’re certainly smarter and cooler under pressure than anybody you or I will ever know, but even his most baroque fabulations have the ring of political veracity. Thomas just makes the awful truth hopelessly entertaining.

“Twilight at Mac’s Place,” his rousingly adroit new thriller, begins with the death of a 57-year-old sometime CIA operative named Steadfast Haynes. His companion at the moment of his death, at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, is a 33-year-old French reporter, Isabelle Gelinet, who promptly, and subtly, blackmails the bureaucrats at Langley into giving her old friend an Army burial at Arlington Cemetery. Steady, she informs them, has left behind a copy of his memoirs that just might give an honest account of what Haynes “had really done as an occasional agency hire in Africa, the Middle East, Central America and Southeast Asia.”

At Steady’s sparsely attended Arlington funeral, we meet an arms-dealing ex-French Foreign Legionnaire named Tinker Burns; Isabelle; an aging CIA operative named Gilbert Undean, who knew Steady in his Laos days, and the novel’s true protagonist, Granville Haynes, Steady’s 33-year-old son. Granville is one of Thomas’ larger-than-life, improbably well-rounded men of action. A former LAPD homicide detective with a master’s degree in Old French from the University of Virginia, he has recently won the state lottery, enabling him to retire from the force to pursue an acting career. As it turns out, he’ll need to be both cop and actor to get out of this situation alive.

As the inheritor of Steady’s combustible memoirs--which he is not certain actually exist--Granville finds himself at the center of a bidding war. An anonymous figure offers him $100,000 for the book. The CIA, cringing at the thought of publication, makes a counter offer. And then the war gets lethal. Isabelle, who helped Steady write his memoirs, is found murdered in her bathtub. Someone, it seems, has a very literal notion of a kill fee.

No more of the plot should be revealed; suffice it to say that the nastiness is just beginning, and the twists come with breathless efficiency. (Amazingly, Thomas never outlines his plots--he makes them up as he goes along.)

Adding to the fun is the appearance of two Thomas regulars, McCorkle and Padillo, the heroes of his first, Edgar-winning novel, “The Cold War Swap,” as well as “Cast a Yellow Shadow” and “The Back-Up Men.” Mac’s Place, as the faithful already know, is their dimly lit Washington bar and restaurant, the sort of place, Padillo explains, “you go when you have to meet someone and explain why you won’t be getting the divorce after all.” Mac’s Place is to Thomas’ Washington what Rick’s was to Casablanca.

This time Padillo and McCorkle, getting on in years, cede center stage to the younger Granville and to McCorkle’s own 22-year-old daughter Erika, who’s inherited her father’s taste for adventure. McCorkle himself has hit 221 pounds and now chews Nicorettes, while the dashing Padillo--”the assassin’s assassin,” as one of his enemies calls him--seems to have stolen “the secret of eternal middle age--if not youth itself.” The presence of these “old dragons,” a step or two slower than they used to be, gives Thomas, 63, the opportunity to punctuate his suspense tale with witty ruminations on the changing times, whether it’s the inflationary cost of hiring a hit man or the fact that nobody eats his salad after his meals any more.

“Twilight at Mac’s Place” takes place in the Washington of the Oliver North trials, shortly after the inauguration of the 41st President. “What you’ve got now is the first director of Central Intelligence ever to be President, which they don’t seem to mention much anymore,” remarks Tinker Burns. Mixed in with characters with work names like Pabst and Schlitz are sprinkled resonate references to Casey, Poindexter, Hakim and North. These are the real toads in Thomas’ imaginary garden, and their presence seems to inspire him to his mordant best.

“Twilight at Mac’s Place” is the most stylish and suspenseful of the Padillo-McCorkle series, the most densely populated with memorable characters. As always, there’s not a wasted motion in his fleet, elegant prose.

This book is serious fun. But what Ross Thomas thriller isn’t?