CRIMINAL PURSUITS

January comes in with a bang-bang, a towering pile of crime writing, much of it by honored names.

Martha Grimes is back with The Old Contemptibles (Little, Brown: $19.45; 332 pp.), the 11th in her pub-named mysteries featuring Richard Jury of the Yard. This time Jury, as Albert Campion did in the Margery Allingham books, becomes ever more a background figure, emerging in time to tidy things up but with the book’s principal focus on others.

Grimes has a marvelous way with foxy elders and nicely idiosyncratic children, and that particular skill is pleasantly conspicuous here. Jury, his longtime lady-love evidently determined to marry an unsatisfactory Italian (unsatisfactory to Jury’s friends), has been courting another woman who turns up dead amid the usual murder/suicide ambiguity.

The woman’s son Alex, a budding card shark and confidence trickster (part catcher in the rye, part artful dodger), has just been bounced from his public school. Jury, stuck in London as a witness if not seriously a suspect, sends pal Melville Plant off to the Lake District to infiltrate the bizarre rich family of which the dead woman was evidently a disowned subsidiary. The family is led, from a nearby elite funny farm, by an eccentric grandfather who, like Alex, is a very attractive invention. There is a feisty teen-age cook who is yet another likable, seeable creation.

The tangled family truths emerge, in one of the best in the Jury series--a story both funny and somber, atmospheric and full of character, and unusually affecting.

In Widows (William Morrow: $18.95; 332 pp.), the phenomenally prolific and good Ed McBain returns to the 87th Precinct in the fictional metropolis of Isola for what is by my count the 43rd time. The police procedural is an inexhaustible resource, especially when the police over the years have become as familiar as relatives.

Carella investigates the brutal murder of a beautiful young woman who, it is quickly discovered, had been the mistress of a rich lawyer (a possible redundancy). Steamy love letters, not much bowdlerized in McBain’s R-rated text, are discovered, along with 12 grand in cash.

Meantime, Carella’s father is gunned down in his bakery by two young hoods and the stories are intercut, Carella in the end facing a fast, hard moral dilemma. Patient detecting and thoughtful sifting of clues lead into the lawyer’s untidy life (himself having been bumped off by a party unknown).

McBain breaks no new ground, but he tends the old ground so well that there’s no need to ask for anything more.

Stuart Woods, whose first novel, “Chiefs,” became a miniseries, is back with his seventh, Palindrome (Harper Collins: $19.95; 346 pp.), an expert and original thriller set largely on Cumberland Island of the Georgia coast near the Florida line. Palindromes are sentences or numbers that read the same each way: “Able was I ere I saw Elba” and 52425, for examples.

The two-way stretch here is a pair of identical twins who haven’t spoken in years or been glimpsed together on their native island. To the island comes a young woman who will photograph it while recovering physically and emotionally from a near-fatal beating administered by her husband, a pro football player for Atlanta (not the Falcons, of course). Hubby has been made sadistically bonkers by the steroids he takes.

The photographer stalks the island and finds love, the ex stalks the photographer, and the climactic meeting takes place amid a cataclysmic hurricane. The ultimate killer is introduced early on, and for once the reader can’t wait for the killer to do his deed.

The island is evoked with real affection, and the plot moves along with hurricane velocity.

Another series figure, H. R. F. Keating’s Bombay Inspector Ghote, returns in The Iciest Sin (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 183 pp.). The iciest sin is blackmail, and Ghote finds himself investigating it, entrapped in it and, at last, in a quite satisfying way, using it. The murder of a blackmailer is witnessed by Ghote, hiding beneath a bed. Nobly concealing the crime is very nearly his undoing.

The plotting is intricate but, more than ever, so are the moral distresses within Ghote. It is, I think, the darkest of the series and not less interesting for it. Ghote, always before at least semi-comical, now contemplates both murder and suicide. In his anguish, he is newly sympathetic.

“Sacrificial Ground,” among Thomas H. Cook’s earlier novels, established him as a writer of uncommon grace and originality. “Streets of Fire,” a re-creation of the Montgomery bus boycott from the point of view of a cop who hated the racist attitudes in the department, was a tour de force. Now, In the City When It Rains (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 260 pp.), Cook has written an extremely sensitive story which is, in strictest terms, a mystery but is at heart a study of two father-daughter relationships.

Corman is a photographer who works like Weegee but thinks like W. Eugene Smith, and who isn’t making it. He has custody of a young daughter (and is terrific with her), but they’re about to be evicted from his shabby apartment.

He photographs a young woman who has leapt to her death, needle marks up an arm, evidence in her shabby room that she’d been starving but trying to feed formula to a doll. Crazed, clearly. Corman, haunted by her, thinks of a book and begins to research her death and life, including visits to Columbia where she was a student and her father, a professor of medieval studies.

Corman finds the tragic truth, and is led to make some hard decisions for himself. It’s another dark study, far from the escapist norm, and in fact indeed the eloquence with which Cook tells his story is inescapable in its impact.

Another series renewal is The Cavalier Case by Lady Antonia Fraser (Bantam: $17.95; 228 pp.), the seventh outing for her free-living television personality Jemima Shore. The death by misadventure of an ancient earl takes her to a slightly down-at-heel stately home, where there is said to be a resident ghost and a mysterious and violent history centering on the family’s Cavalier poet from yesteryear.

The possibility of ghosts is not discounted by Shore, but the murders, of which there are more, are distinctly present-tense and palpable. Jemima figures it all out, but I confess it takes a long, slow, talky time, although, or perhaps because, the author knows the milieu well.

Peter Robinson’s Gallows View (Scribner’s Sons: $17.95; 225 pp.) is a first mystery introducing Inspector Banks of the Yorkshire town of Eastvale (map of the community provided). A Peeping Tom and a pair of toughs attacking and robbing elderly women are the problems in view.

It’s an intimate procedural, nicely and comfortably done, suspenseful as well and satisfying in its resolutions. Robinson is obviously closer to Ruth Rendell’s than to McBain’s police world. But, like Rendell’s Kingsmarkham (if she ever gets back to it), Robinson’s Eastvale and Banks and his family could be around for a good while. It’s a more than competent beginning. Robinson, who is from Yorkshire, now lives and writes in Canada.

The Vig (Donald I. Fine: $18.95; 293 pp.), by the Los Angeles writer John B. Lescroart, reintroduces a San Francisco ex-cop, Dismas Hardy, permanently limping from a wound and now mostly tending bar, with a little private eyeing on the side.

A killer that Hardy had sent up years before is getting out of San Quentin and a former prosecutor warns that the killer will be looking for Hardy. But it’s the prosecutor who apparently has been bumped off, on a houseboat, no trace of the body found. Lescroart is, as before, splendid on the San Francisco scene and on the mixture of cynicism and fatalism by which the police (Lescroart’s anyway) proceed.

The plot twists and turns, pushed by vigorish, the interest a loan shark charges, payments here enforced by a lethal lug named Johnny LaGuardia. Hardy is one of the more real and engaging characters in recent crime-solving.

The Denver mystery writer Rex Burns and Mary Rose Sullivan compiled an anthology of crime stories for use as a classroom text. Now published as Crime Classics (Viking: $18.95; 395 pp.), it has a useful brief history of the form by the compilers and excellent introductions to each of the authors, who range from Poe (predictably) to McBain and Ross Macdonald via Faulkner, Borges and Flannery O’Connor, which is eclectic enough for anybody.