THE HOSTAGE DRAMA : Tracy an Enigmatic World Wanderer : Adventurer: He was a convert to Islam and a fixture in the cafes of Beirut before his disappearance.

Described as an adventurer, writer, fortune-hunter and bookseller, Edward Austin Tracy was the most enigmatic of the American hostages held in the Middle East.

The 60-year-old native of Rutland, Vt., was a passionate convert to Islam, yet he was seized and held by an Islamic group called the Revolutionary Justice Organization for nearly five years. He was a regular fixture in Beirut’s cafes for at least a decade, yet little is known about his life there--and not much about his earlier existence.

Before he moved to Beirut, Tracy spent almost 20 years wandering through Europe, the Middle East and the Caribbean, leading an itinerant life that convinced his captors that he was a spy. U.S. officials have denied that contention.

His 83-year-old mother, Doris, who has not seen her son for 26 years, explained his rambling ways to an interviewer: “He chased money all over the globe. Sometimes he got it, sometimes he didn’t.”

Born Nov. 20, 1930, to an Irish-Catholic family in Rutland, Tracy sang in the chorus and played on the football team during his years at Burlington High School. A yearbook photo shows him as a good-looking youth with wavy blond hair, according to the Reuters news service.

Tracy attended the University of Pennsylvania on a Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, went on to the Wharton School of Business, and later served with the Air Force in Korea for two years.

He held jobs with International Business Machines Corp., Campbell Soup Co. and an insurance concern. But, inexplicably, he abandoned his native land in 1958 for peregrinations that took him to France, Italy, Trinidad, the Canary Islands, Egypt, Iran, Iraq and Germany.

In Germany, he married a woman named Ingeberg with whom he had three children--Lawrence, Margaret Ann and Monica--and tried to start a beer hall. The venture failed.

Not disheartened, he wrote to his mother that “he thought he’d be able to find an inheritance,” Doris Tracy later recalled.

In the mid-1970s, Tracy moved to Beirut, where he sold books, including English-language classics, encyclopedias and the Koran, the Islamic holy book. He sometimes described himself as a free-lance writer and an illustrator of children’s books. Acquaintances in Lebanon recalled volumes of poetry he wrote, including one called “Just the Way You Are,” and an erotic volume called, “Girls and War.”

For about 12 years before his abduction in October, 1986, Tracy lived in Muslim West Beirut. He is thought to have moved there after his 1974 divorce from Ingeberg Tracy.

Tracy’s mother lives in South Burlington, Vt., along with his sister and brother-in-law, Maria and Denis Lambert, and a nephew, Thomas Lambert. Family members last saw Tracy in 1965.

Tracy’s son, Lawrence, 29, now lives in Germany, and his daughters, Margaret, 28, and Monica, 23, live in the Canary Islands.

Even the date of Tracy’s abduction has been somewhat mysterious. The Revolutionary Justice Organization announced on Oct. 21, 1986, that it was holding him captive, but is not clear exactly when the group took him hostage.

Contacted after Tracy’s 1986 kidnaping at her home in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Ingeberg Tracy described her former husband as mentally unstable. She told Tracy’s hometown newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, that she thought letters he wrote to her were bizarre.

In one letter, he reportedly claimed to be “the father of 5,000 motorcycles.” In letters to neighbors, he wrote that he had seen his younger daughter in a movie, and that the elder daughter had married an Arab sheik.

“The letters were so ridiculous, so crazy that . . . they didn’t make sense at all,” Ingeberg Tracy told the newspaper.

Tracy began writing letters to his mother, former wife and others a year before his abduction. They focused largely on news of the family and did not discuss the politics of Lebanon, nor the war that raged around his home in West Beirut.

“The only thing he said in the letters is ‘the war goes on.’ He never said it affected him or anything,” his mother said.

Asked by an interviewer why she did not suggest that he leave the violent, bombed-out city, Doris Tracy demurred: “I don’t suggest to 56-year-old sons.”

At his release, Tracy showed signs that his ordeal had not dulled his sense of humor. Though frail-looking, and with dark circles under his eyes, Tracy had the energy Sunday to joke with reporters in Damascus, Syria: “I pay $100 for each magazine cover.”

And asked on Cable News Network what he thinks of his captors, he declared: “Some of them can cook really good. They even do cordon bleu, you know.”