CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Walter Mosley’s “Devil in a Blue Dress” won a well-deserved Mystery Writers of America nomination as the best first novel of 1990. His portrait of Ezekiel (Easy) Rawlins, a kind of reluctant and unofficial private investigator trying to stay alive and loose in Watts, had the ear-perfect dialogue, the eye-perfect observance and the narrative drive of, say, the work of Elmore Leonard. But the book had, additionally, the authority of the view from inside South-Central Los Angeles, looking out.

Mosley’s second book, A Red Death (W. W. Norton: $18.95; 288 pp.) confirms that the first was no accident. The new novel may be even better in its complexity and range. The period is the ‘50s of the Cold War and feverish anti-communism. Easy, who made some money last time, has parlayed it into houses whose ownership he has tried to conceal with insufficiently fancy footwork.

Between them, an IRS agent and an FBI man coerce him into spying on a foreign-born white man doing good works in Watts, clearly a subversive. Caught between a good man he likes and two men he distrusts, Easy looks to lose everything, from his pride to his holdings to his life. The first-person narrative suggests Easy will eventually be OK; then again, you could come to an incomplete sentence.

Mosley, who now lives in New York but knows Watts like an after-hours bartender, creates characters--men, women and children--who are vivid, individual and as honest as home movies. Easy, who can kill if he needs to, is at heart compassionate, nonviolent and an eloquent commentator.

“I didn’t even believe in history, really,” he says. “Real was what was happening to me right then. Real was a toothache and a man you trusted who did you dirt. Real was an empty stomach or a woman saying yes, or a woman saying no. Real was what you could feel.”

Mosley is a new, strong and original voice, here to say and not to be missed.

Robert B. Parker is not a new voice, but a good one. Pastime (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 223 pp.) is by my count the 20th in the Spenser series. Paul, whom Spenser saved as a teen-ager from his lethally feuding parents in “Early Autumn” years before, is now an adult. His mother, irresponsible as ever, has disappeared, evidently with the latest man in her life. Can Spenser find her?

Sure, especially when the fancy man has stolen a million in getaway money from an old Boston gangster and his stupid but nasty heir. As always, Spenser and his love for 16 years, Susan, spend a lot of time cooking, eating and making merry. This time Spenser also talks about his motherless childhood in Laramie, Wyo., learning to cook for a father and two uncles who couldn’t.

There is a fine set-piece, a stalking in a Massachusetts forest, Spenser outnumbered and badly wounded. Just don’t bet on the bad guys, any more than you bet against Gene Autry. The suspenseful ending is toned with a nice irony, suggesting that in poetic justice there are fates worse than death.

Mysteries that do not merely use but explore a social issue are not common. Jeremiah Healy’s Right to Die (Pocket Books: $18.95: 288 pp.) is in fact about the right-to-die issue. His man, a private investigator named John Francis Cuddy, is asked to protect an outspoken law professor who helped her terminally ill husband commit suicide when they lived in Spain. Now the haters, including some neo-Nazi skinheads, are threatening her, along with an anonymous note-sender.

As an incidental sub-theme, Healy (himself a professor of law at the New England School of Law) describes in large and engrossing detail Cuddy’s training for and running in the Boston Marathon. The you-are-there agony of it gets off the page and into the reader’s own trembly underpinnings. Healy takes his plot to an ending that is surprising and inventive, yet driven by his book’s major theme.

The Orange County husband-and-wife team of Ann and Evan Maxwell, writing as A. E. Maxwell, return in Money Burns (Villard Books: $18; 292 pp.), another outing for Fiddler and his ex-wife, present love and competitive investigative partner Fiora.

A powerful mother who runs a small Orange County bank has given her wastrel son one of the branches to manage and he has goofed up royally, laundering big bucks for a South American drug dealer. The mother hires our team to straighten out the bent branch.

The plot, an intricate piece of make-believe, involves $15 million of the dealer’s money, a delivery man with an eye to declaring his independence, a kidnaped son, and an elaborate ruse that makes Fiddler and Fiora short-time confederates of the nasty Don Faustino and an even nastier henchman. It’s good fun: Orange County is portrayed to a fare-thee-well, and the Fiddler-Fiora relationship, sexily atingle, is always good copy.

A. W. Gray, described as a sometime professional poker player and golf pro, did a dandy first novel called “In Defense of Judges.” He is back with The Man Offside (E. P. Dutton: $18.95; 246 pp.), which is about as relentlessly (and readably) noir as novels get.

His man, Rick Bannion, a sometime lineman for the Dallas Cowboys and the Rams, is mostly remembered for jumping offside and earning a penalty which cost the team the game and the championship. He has stayed offside, serving five years inside on a drug frame-up, and is now tracing bailbond-jumpers.

An old Cowboys teammate is busted for cocaine-dealing and his wife, whom Bannion loved first, asks him to help out. He has to kidnap a government witness just long enough for his pal to be freed on bond at the arraignment hearing.

Corruption is endemic on both sides of the law (a noir hallmark), and Gray captures the resulting paranoia with chilling effect. The denouement is Shakespearean in its totality (as in “MacBeth” and “Hamlet”) with the heightened poignancy of an empty stage.

Michael David Anthony’s The Becket Factor (St. Martin’s: $17.95; 254 pp.) is a first novel, imaginatively set within Canterbury Cathedral, where the ghost of Thomas a Becket, murdered there in 1170, may still hover among the stones. The time is now, and what is at issue is the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Will it be a fiery social-activist bishop, or a man in the more genteel modern tradition of the Canterbury See?

As a plot that is parallel rather than sub, workmen have found a tomb which might, just might, contain the bones of Thomas a Becket himself. Anthony has researched his past and present nicely, and while the solution is out of right field, so to speak, the atmosphere is vividly musty, so to speak again, and the debut promising.

Like Walter Mosley’s debut, Bruce Zimmerman’s “Blood Under the Bridge” was nominated as best first novel of its year, 1989. Like Mosley and A. W. Gray, he has flown over the sometimes formidable hurdle of the second novel. Thicker Than Water (HarperCollins: $19.95; 209 pp.) is a fast and enjoyable thriller bracketed by San Francisco but with most of the action on the island of Jamaica.

A San Francisco stand-up comic inherits a Jamaican estate from an old pal, who has been murdered. The comic asks another pal, investigator Quinn Parker, to fly down and check it out with him.

There is a lot to check out: the stunning widow; some of the host’s druggy pals, male and female; a shrewd lawyer who calls himself Bongo; a mean, bent cop, and others with plans for the estate that do not include the rightful inheritor.

The lush setting, including a seven-tier waterfall, is in effect another character in the novel. And Zimmerman can turn a peppy line, as in describing a party lady with “a Texas accent strong enough to warp floorboards.” Not sure what it means but I like it.