CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Sharyn McCrumb, who won an Edgar in 1988 for “Bimbos of the Death Star,” can be one of funniest of crime writers, a social satirist well displayed in 1990’s “The Windsor Knot.” But she can also be movingly serious, a side of her versatility wonderfully displayed in The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (Scribner’s: $19; 306 pp.).

The title, unfortunately, is as misleading as a movie trailer. The Hangman is a mountain-top formation; the identity of the beautiful daughter is a bafflement. McCrumb, who lives in Virginia, writes with special fondness and insight about Appalachia, and she returns to it in this many-stranded account of life deep in the hills and hollers of Tennessee.

McCrumb’s dominating figure, an elderly spinster who has what locals call The Sight (the unsought gift of foretelling tragedies she can’t prevent), becomes a kind of Celtic chorus on the dramas and the players. The central event has been the slaughter of a new family in the vicinity. A teen-ager has killed his father (a retired Army officer) and mother, a kid brother and then himself, leaving two other teen-aged siblings to fend for themselves. The why of it is the novel’s mystery, and its denouement is affectingly sad.

But there is more than a mystery this time. There is in fact very nearly an “Our Town” feeling to McCrumb’s account of daily existence in Dark Hollow: the church socials, the endemic poverty, the sense of a past that is both nourishing and entrapping.

The mystery may not be a classic puzzle, but of suspense there is plenty. The fate of the dazed survivors is suspenseful. So is the fight of an old man (dying of cancer undoubtedly caused by the town’s poisoned river) to bring to account the owner of the polluting paper mill upstream. (This becomes a hilariously satisfying confrontation amid the other, more somber goings-on.)

Suspenseful as well is the life and pregnancy of the wife of a young local preacher who is off being a chaplain in the Gulf war and who is confronting his growing uncertainty about his vocation. (Here as elsewhere, the reader is led to speculate about events that will extend beyond the novel’s end.)

By its nature, crime fiction--intending to be a pleasing diversion--does not often provoke tears. Even its bloodiest deaths are relievingly bloodless, its pains savingly distanced from the reader. But McCrumb draws you close, makes you care, leaves you with the sense, sought for in most fiction, that what has gone on has been not invention but experience recaptured. It is a fine book, mistitled or not.

The ever-prolific Ruth Rendell is back with her fifth novel written as Barbara Vine; as always, she seems by any name to delight in setting herself challenges--creating stories remarkable in their placings, their multiple and crosshatched relationships and their psychological complexity.

In King Solomon’s Carpet (Harmony/Crown: $20; 352 pp.), Vine’s setting is a moldering old London mansion, once a private school, situated near a tube station. The house has become a kind of commune, negligently presided over by a descendant of the schoolkeepers, a young man whose passion is for subway systems worldwide. He is writing a history of the London Underground, and the lore Vine has dug up, to coin a phrase, is fascinating.

The commune inhabitants include a terrorist, some buskers (musicians who work the tube stations) and assorted soiled kin of the landlord. As she did in “The House of Stairs,” Vine creates a gallery of vivid eccentrics operating along a narrow border between despair and tragedy.

In mid-story Vine does a set-piece of sustained dramatic action (the planting of a bomb) that would not be out of place in Ambler, Fleming or Forsyth.

Vine does not put much stock in happy endings--this one is to a high degree explosive--and what she generates for her characters is closer to pity than sympathy, which is probably why some readers find her austere and off-putting. But no one gets inside aberrant psychological states like Rendell/Vine, and no one, in my view, does books that are more continually surprising and exciting.

American crime fiction has no finer prose stylist than James Lee Burke, and he has never been better than in A Stained White Radiance (Hyperion: $19.95; 305 pp.), the fifth of his stories about Dave Roubicheaux, a New Orleans detective who also runs a bait shop out in the bayous, with his wife and the adopted daughter he rescued after a plane crash in an earlier adventure. (The title is from Shelley.)

Burke, who grew up on the Gulf Coast but has had a peripatetic life, including a hitch as a social worker in Los Angeles, wrote several “straight” novels and a collection of fine short stories before turning to mysteries. He is an intricate plotter with all the narrative gifts of the born storyteller. Yet he is uncommonly concerned with and eloquent about the textures and the stresses of his times.

In the new book, set in the Louisiana turf that produced David Duke, he creates a racist right-winger named Bobby Earl Sonnier, one of a family Roubicheaux had grown up with, watching their graspings and their aspirations. Beyond the family’s problems, Roubicheaux faces some particularly vicious New Orleans thugs, who very nearly put an end to the detective’s career.

Yet the novel’s interest lies not simply in the pulsing events, gripping as they are, but in Roubicheaux’s (and Burke’s) perceptions of what they mean.

“Bobby Earl’s ilk,” Roubicheaux thinks, “want power so badly that at some point in their lives they make a conscious choice to embrace evil. . . . They do it without reservation, and that’s when they leave the rest of us.”

Burke is notable for his conveyance of the banality of evil, but he is notable not less for his compassion and for his ultimate faith in the power of decent human relationships to triumph, somehow.

Michael Collins of Santa Barbara has as his present series figure the one-armed private investigator Dan Fortune, whose last adventures were in Central American jungles. But, like Burke, Collins is perceptive about and sensitive to the world immediately around him, and he examines it with special care in Cassandra in Red (Donald I. Fine: $19.95; 248 pp.).

A homeless young woman, known as Cassandra to the other homeless in whose behalf she had been an activist, is found stabbed to death in a Santa Barbara playground storeroom where she was crashing. Had her activism gone too far for someone of power, or was it a random robbery/murder? Fortune’s nosings-around lead to some of the city’s street gangs (not as lethal as those in Los Angeles but still potentially violent). He is also led to a particularly nasty sect of rich Anglo teen-agers.

Collins knows the turf very well, and the racial tensions and emotions that crackle across it, and he tells a story that carries the sting of the very possible. It is a provocative entertainment.

Robert K. Tanenbaum, former assistant D.A. in Manhattan, former mayor of Beverly Hills, presently a political candidate for higher office, has written previous thrillers about a New York assistant D.A. named Butch Karp. Reversible Error (Dutton: $20; 292 pp.), like the earlier works, bears an unmistakable stamp of authenticity. The overworked staffers, plea-bargaining simply to prevent an overburdened justice system from freezing-up totally; the conniving and corruption, the political pressures and the bitter humor--it says the reality can’t be much different.

This time some big drug dealers are being gunned down; no great loss, except that it’s evidently being done by cops in the pay of some very highly placed figures. Karp steps neck-deep into a game of deceptions and counterdeceptions. In a parallel plot, Karp’s colleague and love, Marlene, is trying to trap a serial rapist and nearly gets killed for her pains.

Reading Tanenbaum is a guided tour through a vivid if depressing milieu is which justice is not only blind but also enfeebled.