BOOK REVIEW : Hard-Bitten Detective Is Trapped in the ‘60s : NICE GUYS FINISH DEAD, <i> by David Debin,</i> Turtle Bay Books, $19; 339 pages

Ever since Roger Simon, the brilliant writer who gave us the Moses Wine mysteries, took to writing scripts and winning Academy Awards for them, Los Angeles has been without an aging hipster detective with values and memories firmly rooted in the ‘60s. (We’ve got every other kind of attractive, engaging detective, but not that kind.)

Now here comes Albie Marx, who wrote one bestseller in that lost and fabled decade, and had something to do with Janis Joplin’s death. (Was Albie there? Did he give her the heroine? Or did he only discover the body?)

After a period of despair and obscurity during the ‘70s and ‘80s, Albie has been given a helping hand out of the muck by the editor of a counter-culture magazine, so that Albie’s back in business now, writing an irate column, tilting at the Big Business Windmills of the day, driving his ’66 Jaguar at breakneck speed over our canyon roads. (Didn’t Moses drive a Porsche?) And where Moses anesthetized his sorrows with Wild Turkey, Albie soothes his throat and dulls his pain with Cuervo Gold.

It’s tough to get old, especially for Albie. His son works for Disney Studios and can’t fit him in for lunch. His succession of blind-drunk one-night-stands are still fun, but not fun the way they used to be. When a fairly steady lady friend of his, Linda Selby, a sweet and pretty social activist, turns up dead, part of Albie’s regret is that he was never able to be more than just fond of her; never able to feel . . . what , love? The very thought is preposterous.

Albie is still trapped, still haunted, by a vision of the ‘60s that won’t go away: “We thought we were so great then. We could touch the stars. We were Love, we were God, we were Music. Everything was of the same fabric, we were only one thread each, but oh, what a miraculous tapestry we all made together. Then Reality set in. While we were making love, Someone Else was making money.”

With these ingredients laid in, the mystery proceeds briskly. There’s poor, dead Linda. An initial list of four suspects. A police lieutenant with the improbable name of Danno (a riff on “book him, Dano!”). A lovely young girl who claims to be Linda’s daughter. And some nasty CIA types who have decided to turn this drugged-out society into a flock of drug zombies with a new chemical compound called NICE--kissing cousin to Aldous Huxley’s SOMA--a drug where you don’t get stoned but you do want to buy everything in every K mart you see.

Although the drug sections are the most awkwardly written (the author even throws in an ex-Nazi or two to keep the plot rolling), they indirectly remind the reader that all drugs are not the same.

The same botanical plant, in this narration, depending on how its jimmied with, can either expand your consciousness and let you see God, or totally turn you into a docile consumeroid, obsessed with sports socks and Barbie dolls.

This is intended to be the first in a series of Albie Marx mysteries, so it’s a pretty good bet that Albie won’t get the girl in the end, or turn into a far better human being than he was on Page 1.

But Albie’s general scuzziness, his hatred of things-as-they-are, even his unhealthy taste for hard liquor and an occasional toke on an occasional joint, serve as a bracing reminder of things as they used to be, when love (in theory at least) was more highly esteemed than money, and great rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, instead of spread sheets, informed both our imaginations and our brains.