The Bomb-Thrower of Mexico : THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW, <i> By Paco Ignacio Taibo II translated by William I. Neuman (Viking Press: $18.95; 228 pp.)</i>

Much of the best crime fiction has often been a masked form of social criticism. Where better to explore society’s ills than in the hidden byways of its criminal elements both high and low? How better to propagandize for justice than by beguiling us with a racy murder mystery that disguises the author’s true intent?

This agreeable, if devious, strategy can, however, have its price. It is not entirely accidental that Dashiell Hammett was imprisoned for his views or that Leonardo Sciascia of Sicily was frequently threatened by the Mafia or that writers such as Jim Thompson and Horace McCoy spent much of their lives as social pariahs. After all, they dared to say who was really guilty in society. And the answers rarely were comfortable for the powers that be.

How unsurprising then that Mexico’s leading crime writer, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, has had several brushes with the law in his benighted country. Taibo, who has been a legend in Mexico for more than a decade and consistently on top of their best-seller lists, has spent years being watched by his nation’s own police and narco-security forces even though most of the bombs he throws have ultimately been aimed at us.

Fortunately for readers, these bombs arrive in the form of brilliantly entertaining books. The first of these to be translated here was last year’s contemporary mystery “An Easy Thing,” featuring Hector Belascoaran Shayne, a private detective who shares his office with an engineer in Mexico City’s sewer system. This is an aptly chosen venue for a book that presents a devastating portrait of the Mexican capital in the ‘80s as it hurtles toward ecological disaster.

This year we have “The Shadow of the Shadow,” a yet more complex work of historical crime fiction. (Taibo, a former professor of history, taught at the Metropolitan University of Mexico City).

The story is set in 1922 and concerns the secret “Plan of Mata Redonda.” This scheme, an outgrowth of the Mexican Revolution, was a conspiracy of three army colonels, a handful of U.S. senators and the major oil companies to separate the oil-rich Gulf Coast of Mexico from the rest of the country and turn it into an American protectorate.

Against this nasty background, Taibo presents us with a kaleidoscopic picture of the Mexico of that time, a country whose bountiful resources were equaled only by the number of scoundrels more than willing to exploit them.

The principles in the adventure are four friends who meet nightly to play dominoes (still a Mexican national pastime) in the bar of the capital’s Hotel Majestic. They are Fermin Valencia, a diminutive poet and veteran of Pancho Villa’s cavalry; Tomas Wong, Chinese-Mexican union organizer with a checkered past; Alberto Verdugo, an amiably sleazy lawyer, and Pioquinto Manterola, a crime reporter who dreams of writing fiction.

Richly characterized, they are, by careful design, simply ordinary men, drawn innocently and violently into the cover-up of another of history’s dark crimes. Along the way they meet a bizarre panoply of personages including tong lords, secret police, Hungarian hypnotists, opium addicts and a cadre of clandestine ‘20s anarchists. Added to the mix are many historical personages and Mexican tourist sights familiar to Americans, such as the ubiquitous Sanborns drugstores seen here in an entirely new light.

The novel’s style--short, ironic bursts--is not like conventional American or British crime fiction. It might better be described as a blending of the roman noir with magic realism, a cross between Raymond Chandler and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The translation by William I. Neumann is fluid and idiomatic.

According to the dust jacket, this book already had been published in eight countries, including France, Italy and Bulgaria, before it made its short journey north of the border to our shores. But then we always have taken our southern neighbors for granted. That so few of Taibo’s novels have been translated here calls to mind the famous quote that also could be construed as the theme of many of the author’s books: “Poor Mexico, so far from Heaven, so close to Texas.”