CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Between them, Dick Francis and William Murray have done more to popularize horse races than parimutuel betting. The authors’ points of departure are interestingly different. Francis as a former jockey provides the view (and the physical sensations) from horseback more vividly than anyone else. As a devout student of the Racing Form, Murray gives us the sport seen from railside, and the hopes that spring eternal among railbirds, even within a blizzard of torn tote tickets.

Francis has only infrequently given his heroes a second outing. Murray sticks with Shifty Lou Anderson, a good but not greatly successful magician, specializing in hand tricks, who loves his art almost as much as he loves the racing life, even when he doesn’t win. Anderson is terrific company, likable, comprehensible, entirely persuasive about the psychic if not the financial rewards of steady attendance at the track.

Murray’s latest outing with Shifty Lou, I’m Getting Killed Right Here (Doubleday: $18.50; 248 pp.) reveals a major difference between his track tales and Francis’.

Francis excels at putting his protagonists through awful tortures, fondly and extensively described. Murray, who in his other career reports from Italy for The New Yorker, sets up all sorts of potential mayhems against Shifty, but--with occasional exceptions--he elects not to celebrate the violence, or he keeps it off camera, so to speak. The choice is oddly refreshing.

This time Shifty Lou is now the owner of a fine horse named Mad Margaret, the gift of a previous client (in “The Getaway Blues”). Shifty has to sell a half-interest in her to pay for the hay. The buyer proves to be a sullen bully of a builder with thuggy pals and a gorgeous, dangerous wife.

The wife proves fatefully irresistible to Shifty, not customarily given to casual sprints. (Their lovemaking is expressed in racing terms, to splendidly funny effect.) Shifty and Mad Margaret are instantly at risk, and the thugs promise to leave Shifty Lou’s hands unable to hold a deck, let alone shuffle it. The plot expands to embrace a super-rich nut and the stolen water rights to a whole horsy valley.

The finale, inevitably, is Mad Margaret’s big race. The outcome is not necessarily a sure thing and, as always when Murray is at trackside, the pleasures are in the crowd noises, the conversation of the yardbirds and the reader’s satisfying awareness that an author’s true love of the milieu--Murray lives at Del Mar to be near the track--is being conveyed in every line.

It’s hard not to finish Richard Hugo’s Death and the Good Life (Clark City Press, Livingston, MT. 59047: $9.95; 280 pp., paper) with feelings of deep melancholy. It is the only mystery and the only fiction that Hugo, a fine and honored poet, ever wrote, and it is first-rate. Hugo died in 1982, two years after the novel was first published. Although well-reviewed at the time, the book has not until now had the continuing attention it deserves.

Hugo, who was directing the University of Montana’s creative-writing program when he died, set his story in Montana, with excursions to Portland and Seattle. His very attractive hero, Mush Heart Barnes (for a forgiving heart rare in peace officers), has been invalided off the Seattle force and is a deputy sheriff in a rural county.

A giant woman has been ax-murdering luckless males. Barnes tracks her down--a novel in itself--but there’s been a copycat murder, which Barnes’ patient tracking also solves, in a curiously predictable but still startling finale.

Interestingly, Hugo--twice nominated for National Book Awards for his poetry--writes a crisp, dialogue-driven narrative, a style closer to Hammett than, say, to P. D. James. His deep affection for the Montana good life is wholly clear, but made so by direct statement rather than poetic flights. A wonderful book, very sadly without sequel.

Yet another of the new breed of female private eyes created by women is Linda Barnes’ Carlotta Carlyle, who stands 6-feet-1 and whose turf is Boston. Steel Guitar (Delacorte: $18.50; 257 pp.) is her fourth appearance and in it she steps into her past as a would-be rock guitarist when an old friend, who has gone on to rock glory, asks for help.

The friend is being blackmailed over song credits and resulting royalties, and her life seems under threat. Like Kinsey Milhone, Carlyle is an activist who keeps attacking blackjacks with the back of her head. Except for her height and her surroundings, not much distinguishes her sharply from her sisters in crime, but she is a lively companion and Barnes makes the rock scene raucously credible, if less than glamorous.

Evelyn E. Smith’s Susan Melville is nothing if not a novelty--a well-born and successful New York painter who also is an amateur and occasionally professional assassin. Noting a pimp sitting smugly in his Cad opposite a home for unwed mothers, she plugs him betwixt the eyes and hurries off to tea. She is a kind of up-market Charles Bronson in “Death Wish.”

In Miss Melville Rides a Tiger (Donald I. Fine: $18.95; 218 pp.), she is asked to knock off the begum of a small but corrupt Middle Eastern dynasty. The lady turns out to be an overweight old school chum who once had a fling with Melville’s rotten father. There are innumerable plot complications, including plans to use the home for unwed mothers as cover for an international drug ring. The face-down, neatly and farcically done, is in Bloomingdale’s.

What Smith attempts is a literary legerdemain unmatched since “Charlie’s Aunt.” The wonder is that she makes such preposterous goings-on so light-footedly entertaining.

The furiously prolific Stuart M. Kaminsky, who keeps two series going while running the film and television school at Florida State in Sarasota, is back with the 16th Toby Peters mystery, The Melting Clock (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 198 pp.). There are now seven titles in the Porfiry Rostnikov series about a Moscow detective.

The present title somehow evokes Salvador Dali, and indeed Peters, a half-closed private eye operating in 1942 Hollywood, is asked to recoup three paintings and three clocks stolen from Dali up in Carmel. The theft of two of each was a Dali publicity stunt, but something got out of hand and there are two corpses, with Peters a suspect in both instances.

Kaminsky makes Dali as surreal in speech as on canvas, and wartime Hollywood comes as effortlessly alive as, say, medieval times in Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael stories. Wartime Hollywood now seems medieval in its own way. Kaminsky’s story is slight, swift and enjoyable.

One of the best of present mysterians in England, Peter Lovesey, in The Last Detective (Doubleday: $18.50; 331 pp.), writes a superior police procedural which is, at heart, a steadily surprising portrait of the detective himself, a crusty old sort named Peter Diamond. He leaps to conclusions quite wrong-headedly, which is part of his unlikely and peculiar appeal, and is impatient with modern forensics and their ability to find guilt in a shred of fingernail. Diamond insists there is still no substitute for patient, plodding footwork, and of course he’s not wrong.

A soap-opera star whose soap time ran out is found dead. The husband she once tried to kill is an obvious suspect, but nothing is simple. Diamond at last finds himself at odds with another detective, who has leaped to equally inaccurate conclusions. The denouement is at once complex and truly surprising. Thickly textured, amusing, unpredictably mixing puzzle and procedural, Lovesey’s book is one of the best.