CRIMINAL PURSUITS

First novels are always exciting, giving promise that a new voice is at hand, a new career beginning. Alex Abella’s The Killing of the Saints (Crown Publishers: $20; 288 pp.) carries a particular excitement. While Elmore Leonard and others have explored the Cuban-American community in Miami in their fiction, Abella appears to be the first to set a mystery within that community in Los Angeles.

The son of a Cuban poet-essayist, Abella has been a newspaper and television journalist, a Time magazine stringer in El Salvador and, most importantly for his novel, for several years acted as a translator in the Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Two marielitos --criminal types deported by Castro--knock over a downtown jewelry store and kill the owner and several bystanders. There are unusual circumstances. One of the killers claims no knowledge of the slaughter, arguing that he was possessed by one of the gods of Santeria, a religious cult that combines traces of Catholicism with African tribal worship.

Abella’s protagonist, Charles Morrell, a lawyer who is himself a Cuban exile, is asked to investigate. His client is a charismatic figure who conducts his own defense, leading to a surprising verdict and a savage aftermath. The book is largely--and engrossingly--a courtroom drama. It is also a knowing evocation of life in both pre- and post-Castro Cuba, and in South Florida and Los Angeles.

Like Tony Hillerman, Abella suggests that much of what seems to be Santeria’s mystical power can have earthly and empirical explanations. But Abella is less rigorous--or less convinced about the separation of earthly and unearthly poweres. Morrell is a captive of his own mythic past, and of fancies that even strong light will not erase.

In his sure-handed storytelling and the intensity of his special vision as a Cuban-American, Abella is surely one of the year’s most important new voices.

A trademark of the most interesting crime writers is their sneaky desire to kick over the traces, or at least rattle them a little. Without departing the genre completely, they tackle off-trail themes, look deeper into character, explore the ambiguities and ironies of a situation.

Robert Barnard won his reputation as a devilishly clever plotter and a sharply witty observer of manners and mores, including the ways of British politics (as in “Political Suicide”). In A Scandal in Belgravia (Charles Scribner’s Sons: $17.95; 245 pp.), Barnard applies his established skills to an intricate tale involving the 30-year-old murder of a brilliant young civil servant in the Foreign Office at the time of the Suez crisis.

The narrator, Peter Proctor, is a minister lately bounced from Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet and settling down to write his memoirs. But he is particularly haunted by the death of a young colleague, Timothy Wycliffe, who was quite openly and unapologetically gay at a time when homosexuality was still a crime (and political death) in Britain.

A young working-class man had fled the country and disappeared after the murder. It grows increasingly probable that he was Wycliffe’s friend, but neither his lover nor his murderer. (Class attitudes loomed large in the society then, as now, and Barnard etches the lines very clearly.)

Barnard’s story is partly a study in detection, the missing man found at last in Los Angeles (which the narrator, and possibly Barnard himself, snarlingly dislikes). But it is in largest part a sympathetic portrait of a charismatic young man who was launching a campaign to decriminalize gay behavior. (Such a campaign ultimately succeeded in Britain.)

The unjudgmental presentation of Wycliffe--like Joseph Hansen’s of Dave Brandstetter through a series of novels--is not likely to change entrenched attitudes, but the authors’ hope is presumably to ameliorate them.

Barnard’s narrator, a widower with two sons, discovers the gruesome truth of Wycliffe’s death--a revelation bordering on the unbelievable. Then, disappointingly, Barnard offers a shocker last line which plays merely as a tricky plotter’s ploy and has the effect of trivializing much that he achieved earlier. Yet for most of its length, the novel is a strong and credible dramatizing of social change.

Lawrence Block’s ex-cop and unlicensed investigator Matthew Scudder has been in nine novels now, memorably “When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.” He still hangs around gin mills, but the hard stuff is closed to him. He’s a recovering alcoholic, faithfully attending meetings and as good an argument for AA as you could ask for.

Scudder is in fact one of the most appealing series characters around: faintly melancholy, concerned for truth and, in his free-form way, effective. The question in A Death at the Slaughterhouse (Morrow: $19; 309 pp.) is whether a young man has killed his wife in a faked burglary. Her brother thinks so.

The investigation leads to a rotten couple, rich and well-placed, who are into snuff murders of young vagrants, the action taped for private connoisseurs. When Scudder gets to do his own killing later on, in cool if not cold blood, you can’t quite blame him.

He’s a long way from what the trade calls the cozies. But the constant reader begins to worry that other readers, like moviegoers, grow so inured to violence that they need ever-larger dollops to hold their attention. Block has caught Scudder, his low-life milieu and his compassion for his fellow drunks so well that you wish his villains were a little nearer the mundane than the monstrous. It’s not as if you can beat the daily papers for ghastly slaughters.

Frank Galvin, the Boston lawyer Paul Newman portrayed so colorfully in “The Verdict,” is back again in Barry Reed’s The Choice (Crown: $20; 358 pp.). Off his success at defeating a Catholic hospital in a medical malpractice case, Galvin has been recruited by one of those blueblood law firms whose partners seem to have arrived on the Mayflower. He is a recovering alcoholic, rich, about to receive full partnership. In effect, he has become the James Mason character he opposed in “The Verdict.”

But at what cost--which is Reed’s story.

Galvin wants to take a pro bono case involving a new drug that may be causing birth defects. But the firm represents the multinational firm selling the drug. Intolerable, if this is still the Galvin we know and love. But the plot is nothing so simple as a conflict of conscience, not with murders, concealments, double-crossings, midnight pursuits and captivities. It’s a story far more contrived and melodramatic than “The Verdict,” but no less suspenseful in its courtroom fireworks.

Jack Hitt’s The Perfect Murder (HarperCollins: $18.95; 195 pp.) is a nifty caper. Hitt, a senior editor at Harper’s magazine, where the idea took shape in print, invents a kept husband who wants to bump off his rich wife and his best friend, with whom she’s having an affair.

He wants, he says, “to commit a crime so beautiful in construction and so ingenious in practice that it aspires to the condition of art.” To this end he sends his specifications to five mystery writers: Lawrence Block, Tony Hillerman, Donald Westlake and Britain’s Sarah Caudwell, and Peter Lovesey.

The book is the ensuing correspondence. The schemes are dazzlingly ornate. Hillerman proposes that the man--his name is Tim--confess his guilt and force the police to disprove it. Lovesey invents a deadly sea wasp to be put in the Jacuzzi.

In a second wave of letters, the writers destroy each other’s plots, or try to. The would-be murderer himself seems to favor a pinch of this and a dab of that, borrowing from all--the art of murder seen as collage.

Tom Takonis’ first novel, “Michigan Roll,” was one of 1988’s best. He is a stylish if sometimes self-conscious writer, ignoring Elmore Leonard’s own creed, which is that if a paragraph sounds like writing, he takes it out. Takonis also is a Michigander--Grand Rapids--and his lads could live just around the corner from Leonard’s.

In Double Down (Dutton: $19.95; 308 pp.), the bad guys are interestingly bad and the good guys aren’t a bit better than they should be. His central figure, Tim Waverly, is a professional poker player, hiding out in Palm Beach after making a particular crime lord very sore after his last adventure.

Now Waverly has two weeks to come up with $350,000 in apology money, but he also has a pair of assassins anxious to ace him whether or not he and partner Bennie manage to pay up.

One of the exterminators is a cool cat with a fitness-and-cleanliness fetish, the other a gluttonous idiot who presumably is learning the ropes and making a terrible tangle of his education.

Occasionally, Takonis’ infatuation with language runs off with him and the story waits for the imagery to settle. But in good time the story takes over and off, building to a high-stakes card game, the bloody intersecting of opposing forces and a real gas of a finale.