CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The classic puzzle mystery, beloved of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr and their descendants, and more recent crime-writing, steeped in introspection and social realism, have seemed separate sub-genres of the form. But in Evidence of Blood (G. P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95; 319 pp.), Thomas H. Cook has melded them with impressive success.

In such previous novels as “Sacrificial Ground” and “Blood Innocents,” Cook has shown himself to be a writer of poetic gifts, constantly pushing against the presumed limits of crime fiction (limits which do not truly exist).

His protagonist in the new book, Jackson Kinley, lives in New York and writes true crime--as Cook has. Now he returns to his small-town Georgia beginnings, where the grandmother who raised him has lately died, and so has his best boyhood pal, later a local policeman.

Kinley’s friend had been nosing into an old crime, the apparently solved murder of a teen-aged girl, for which a luckless local man had been convicted and gone unprotestingly to his execution. But it had all been too easy. Was justice really served, and is there a back story?

The returning native is a pervasive fictional theme, and Cook does it full honor. Sequoyah, Ga., seems only a short drive from Faulkner country, and the sense of both alienation and homecoming that the returnee--older and no longer the poor boy of his youth--usually feels is well caught in Cook’s elegantly sensitive prose.

Talking of genres, the book is not least the equivalent of a police procedural, as Kinley interviews anyone who will talk to him, including the murderer’s daughter, retired judges and cops, a girlfriend of his newly dead pal (who had been found in the woods, victim of a massive, unambiguous heart attack even as he pursued his private investigation).

The trails Kinley gets onto keep going awry. There is an exhumation scene in the town square that yields nothing but astonishment to the reader and, not less, to Kinley and the exasperated town officials. Dame Agatha herself would, I suspect, have been pleased by Cook’s gift for next-to-last surprises, although his somber and convincing tone is more than a world away from St. Mary Mead and Ms. Marple.

Toward the end of the last trail, when the shadowy sequences--of the hitchhiking girl, the stalled truck, the cabin in the dense woods where the town’s rich men did their drinking and their whoring, and the secrets of his grandmother’s tin box--snap into focus as in an errant projector, the strain to catch the emotional power leaves Cook temporarily overwrought.

Kinley sees the truth in a kind of hallucinatory reality, like the memory of a film he had never actually seen, with the dead as living presences. But the pieces fall accurately into place; the reader and Kinley are both prepared--and appalled at so complex a truth.

Cook’s portraits, most particularly of the hapless man who went to his death assuming that in a blighted life it was just one more piece of hard luck, are deep-etched and unforgettable. In company with crime-fiction writers as unlike himself as P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, Cook appears to set himself more demanding tasks each time out, testing his own gifts and, as before, pushing at the boundaries of the form. In this fine new book, he has gone to the edge, and survived triumphantly.

James Thurber wrote deliciously about many things, crime among them. “The MacBeth Murder Mystery,” a breathtaking reinterpretation of the play, is a lovely invention and a gentle spoof of the mystery form (and its avid consumers). The MacBeth piece and three dozen others, including “The Catbird Seat,” another Thurber classic, are included in a slim new volume called Thurber on Crime (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 208 pp.). The work is disparate, to say the least, and Thurber’s infatuation with bloodhounds (the animal) does go on a bit. But any chance to read, or reread, Thurber is welcome, and the pieces--some only fragments--are spiced with those wonderfully lumpy Thurber drawings. Donald E. Westlake, himself a notably comedic crime writer, provides an introduction.

Dorothy Simpson is a veteran English crime writer. Her series featuring the CID’s Inspector Luke Thanet have the solid, familiar comfort of John Creasey’s Gideon stories. In Doomed to Die (Scribner’s: $19.95; 245 pp.), Simpson’s warm, easy style takes up the brutal murder of an artistic if troubled young woman who foresaw her own death. The surprising denouement finds the motive in a tragic history that is only too credible psychologically. It is a tale economically told, even with an undue amount of padding about Thanet’s home life.

Talking Mysteries by Ernie Bulow and Tony Hillerman (University of New Mexico Press: $16.95; 137 pp.) contains a good story, “The Witch, Yazzie and the Nine of Clubs,” featuring Hillerman’s Navajo policeman, Cpl. Jim Chee. But the heart of the book is an unusually revealing author interview. Bulow (who has actually made cameo appearances in three Hillerman novels) is a sometime Navajo trader and bookseller and an old friend, sometimes critical, of Hillerman and his work. His provocative questions evoke as good a picture of Hillerman’s working methods and philosophy as a full-dress biography might.

George V. Higgins (“The Friends of Eddie Coyle”) is yet another lawyer-turned-writer, a former assistant U.S. attorney with a dead-accurate ear (or pen) for dialogue. His new book, The Mandeville Talent (Henry Holt: $19.95; 278 pp.), is, like Cook’s, a present exploration of an old but in this case unsolved murder of a small-city Massachusetts banker. The protagonist, Joe Cahill, tired of serving the rich in a big-city law firm, opts to get away and look into the murder, whose victim was his wife’s grandfather. It’s an intricate story and a tidy bit of detection. The difficulties for the reader are that much of the book reads like an insufficiently edited tape transcript, and the narrative weaves in and out of recollection and retelling to no great gain in interest.

William J. Caunitz, yet another policeman -turned-writer, had a large winner in his first book, “One Police Plaza.” His fourth, Exceptional Clearance (Crown: $20; 315 pp.), has, like the others, the gritty taste of police-procedural reality, here put to the service of very far-out plot involving (no secret early in the book) an actor maddened by the accidental shooting of his wife and turned serial killer as a bizarre way of paying homage to her. Caunitz’s skill is in giving so theatrical a premise a you-are-almost-there credibility and some suspense as the detective himself (John Vinda) and many of his pals are endangered in a further bizarre turn of events.

In Dangerous Waters (Henry Holt: $19.95; 270 pp.), Bill Eidson, author of “The Little Brother,” concocts a sizzler of a story set largely upon water and under water. His adman protagonist, Riley Burke, off for an adulterous sail with a woman from his office, interferes drunkenly in a savage fight with a frail young man and a bully. The bully knocks the whey out of Burke and swears to see him again. The tryst is a disaster: The young man turns up murdered and tethered to the screw of Burke’s boat. The tale, reminiscent in a way of the nemesis-haunted work of Cornell Woolrich, crackles and splashes its way to a gory and surprising finish.