CRIMINAL PURSUITS

William McIlvanney is a Scots writer who has published three volumes of poetry and seven novels. Of the novels, three are police procedurals (although calling them that is a little like calling “Moby Dick” a marine adventure).

“Laidlaw,” introducing the Glasgow detective of that name, appeared in 1977; the first sequel, “The Papers of Tony Veitch,” did not appear for another six years. The third in the series, Strange Loyalties (Morrow: $20; 288 pp.), is just out now, another nine years later.

But all good things are worth waiting for, and McIlvanney is a spectacularly fine writer. His gifts as a poet are revealed in the compact eloquence of sentence after sentence, and in the sensitive depiction of Laidlaw’s inner states and observations as he goes home to Ayrshire to explore the accidental death of a beloved brother.

Laidlaw is a maverick. “It was the crime beyond the crime that had always fascinated me,” he says, “the sanctified network of legally entrenched social injustice toward which the crime I was investigating feebly gestured.”

With none of the forced chasing after images that often goes with the territory, McIlvanney has a way of catching things with a nice precision. A woman stands “with a slightly dazed resignation, like someone waiting for a bus she had begun to think might not travel on this route after all.”

Another woman worries about her biological clock, and Laidlaw understands: “I wasn’t the only one who stared into the darkness above the bed and heard age whispering around me.” His rude independence has not helped his career: “I sometimes get the feeling I’m on foot when everyone else is driving.” An industrial slum in an otherwise lovely city is “a desert in an oasis.” Laidlaw and his ex-wife “had for years enacted a marriage that was a concealment of mutual loneliness.”

Rarely does the reading of mysteries yield such constant and quotable pleasure. But McIlvanney’s story is also suspenseful and full of movement and conflict, although the violence tends to be emotional rather more than physical. The quest for the truth about brother Scott’s death leads Laidlaw well back into both brothers’ lives, to old friends who have changed for better and for much worse, and to a long-concealed tragedy that has affected not one life but several.

A large gallery of characters is caught--the poet at work--with an astonishing economy, like line drawings more evocative than photographs. Laidlaw’s often uncomfortable confrontations with those he knew in another time are reported with wonderful subtlety.

McIlvanney has written a story about honor, loyalty, love in many variations, and about the way the spirit can be eroded by guilt. Crime writing does not get much better than this.

A Death in Paris (Little, Brown: $19.95; 339 pp.) is a first novel by a composer-arranger named Dean Fuller, and it, too, is an unusually stylish piece of writing, although the decorative flourishes cannot conceal what is at last a denouement of high and foolish concocting.

An elderly American gentleman is fatally mugged in a Paris park. The story stops, of course, if it’s only a mugging; thankfully it isn’t. The gent, a sort of ex-officio diplomat for the U.S., evidently also had a covert side to his private life. His widow (an enchanting creation who virtually takes over the book) has curiously little to say about the death and would seem as happy to let it remain a mugging.

His old friends join the widow in Paris, and all of them confront a team of detectives, Alex Grismolet and his Lithuanian assistant, an earnest sort not yet at home in either French or English. (The pair will presumably be heard from again.)

Fuller has a nice way with mystification and with characterization, especially in this case with what we might call “the transients.” It’s a promising debut, and next time Grismolet may be better served by a plot not quite so heavily contrived.

Robert B. Parker’s Double Deuce (Putnam: $19.95; 224 pp.) is the same slick, fast mixture as before, long on food and crisp talk among Spenser, his lethal accomplice, Hawk, and their ladies. But this time the caper is unusually interesting and important.

Hawk has been hired to free a battered housing project (called Double Deuce for its street address, a 22) from its terrifying domination by a street gang. Hawk reverses the usual procedure by hiring Spenser (at no pay) to help. The struggle is largely a war of nerves, and Parker’s insights into gang psychology are well researched, sensitive and saddening. The context is popular entertainment, but Parker does not trivialize the situation.

Nancy Baker Jacobs, who teaches journalism at Cal State Northridge, has written the second novel featuring a detecting woman named Devon MacDonald. In A Slash of Scarlet (Putnam: $19.95; 240 pp.), she is on the trail of an aging Lothario con man who has romanced a whole string of women out of their life savings, skipping off just ahead of the marriage vows and having (usually) done nothing prosecutably illegal.

MacDonald and a posse of furious swindlees track him down to his home base in Carmel where, to nearly everyone’s confusion, he is murdered. Jacobs tells a good, brisk first-person tale and here makes the villain (not much to look at but a clever old smoothie) a very plausible seducer. MacDonald lacks the biting edge of Sara Paretsky’s Warshawski or Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, but she is entertaining company.

Wendy Hornsby, who teaches history at Long Beach City College, introduces in Telling Lies (Dutton: $18; 245 pp.) yet another variant on the female protagonist, a documentary filmmaker named Maggie MacGowen.

MacGowen’s beloved sister, a ‘60s radical now doing saintly good works on Skid Row in Los Angeles, is gunned down in a Chinatown alley on the same afternoon she was to meet her sister and some other old friends with a mysterious but wonderful piece of news, possibly relating to their brother, who was killed in Vietnam.

As in several other novels (most often, interestingly, by California writers), the roots of present murders can be followed back to the explosive protests of campuses in the 1960s and to happenings in ‘Nam itself. So it is here, and Hornsby makes MacGowen’s feelings about the lost brother and sister very affecting. She also evokes the despairs of the inner city with gritty accuracy.

A book I missed when it was published late last year (but which I find is still available) is the fifth and latest winner of the annual competition for the best first private-eye novel. It is The Loud Adios by Ken Kuhlken (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 217 pp.).

Set in San Diego and Tijuana in wartime 1943, it is the first of a planned trilogy featuring a San Diego private eye named Tom Hickey, who has become an MP working the Mexican border. A young GI asks Hickey to rescue his sister, who has fallen into the wrong hands and is dancing nude in a Tijuana club. She is childlike, perhaps retarded, a lost innocent.

The kid has been beaten up for his own efforts to save her, and very quickly Hickey gets well-clobbered, too. The action escalates to a full-scale military-like attack mounted by Hickey with a ragtag platoon of Native Americans and Mexicans, including a one-eyed cab driver who is a fine invention. The girl’s patrons prove to be a collection of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who evidently had been planning their own forays against the United States.

What is notable about the novel is that Kuhlken, who lives in La Mesa, has not only captured the period but also the hard-edged private-eye style that flourished in those same years, as the heirs of Dashiell Hammett emulated his laconic prose, his nonstop action and his protagonists who, like Kuhlken’s Hickey, mask their sentimentality and sense of honor with a thin veneer of tough-talking cynicism.

Hickey puts life and savings at risk in a good cause, and, like that famous tonic water, it’s curiously refreshing. Another very promising debut.