CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Maria’s Girls (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 281 pp.) is the fourth of Jerome Charyn’s “Sidel Quartet,” the further adventures of Isaac Sidel, police commissioner of New York City, and the reader unfamiliar with the earlier volumes is in for a whole skein of jolting astonishments, unsettling but mesmerizing.

Charyn’s, or Sidel’s, contemporary world is phantasmagoric, bizarre, grotesque, a very blackly comedic extrapolation of present trends in political corruption, criminal potency and endemic cynicism. Its spiritual linkages are to “Bladerunner” and other grim visions of tomorrow, or even a bit later this afternoon. The works of Richard Condon also come to mind, although Charyn’s merriments are far darker in tone.

Sidel is an avowed murderer, although he did not quite succeed in offing a lethal mobster named Rubino, who now masterminds a counterattack from a wheelchair. The Maria of the title is Carlos Maria Montalban, who runs the board of education as a private scam, rigging bids on erasers and extorting lunch monies. His girls are fiercely loyal hookers whose influence over the city’s power brokers (including Sidel) extends Montalban’s own power base. Not the least unsavory of Charyn’s inventions is the cardinal-archbishop of New York, who could teach Machiavelli a thing or two about power.

The supporting characters, alike in their generally soiled charm, include a cop married to a billionairess with a treacherous tycoon daddy, and Greta Garbo, in her disguise as Harriet Brown, cadging cigarettes from the commissioner on their walks in Central Park.

Charyn’s prose, underscoring his bleak and special world-view, has its own particularities, including glocked as a synonym for murdered and derived from an imported handgun of great efficiency and power.

Events proceed at a very fast and occasionally dazing pace, the dialogue vivid and frequently acrid. And for all the grittiness of the view, there is a curious subtext of nostalgia for a time before things got quite so bad. The commissioner’s idol is a former baseball star who could be Mel Ott by another name. Sidel tries gamely to do in both Maria and the mobster.

But when the mad dance is over, things end as outrageously as they began, and what is clear is that nobody else on the planet writes quite like Mr. Charyn, which is high if nervous praise.

Elizabeth George, the former Orange County high school English teacher who writes about England exactly as if she were a native Briton (even to using such spellings as colour and neighbour ), continues her remarkable literary transportation in For the Sake of Elena (Bantam: $20; 388 pp.).

Having invented a boys’ public school in “Well-Schooled in Murder,” George this time even more ambitiously invents a whole new college at Cambridge University, bounded on three sides by Trinity and on the fourth by the river Cam.

A beautiful, deaf student, daughter of an important and ambitious professor at the college, is brutally murdered during a pre-dawn run. Explorations by George’s resident sleuths, Inspector Thomas Lynley of the Yard (an aristocrat by birth) and his lower-born, tart-tongued assistant, Sgt. Barbara Havers, leave no doubt that the dead girl was no angel but a promiscuous and unscrupulous manipulator who despised her father, mother, stepmother and the world at large. She also was pregnant, with a lengthy list of candidates for a paternity rap. Accordingly, there is an ample list of murder suspects.

George, like P. D. James, whom she comes as close to resembling as anyone now writing, can concoct an intricate timetable plot with a guess-again finale, but her larger interests are in character delineation, relationships closely observed, and social issues exposed.

The girl’s bitter mother has a tongue that would cut stainless steel. The disparate responses of the hearing-impaired in a hearing world are sensitively recorded. Havers’ guilt-soaked worries about what to do with her senile mother and Lynley’s desperate love for a woman not sure she can share him with his work would be obtrusive were they not imagined with such depth and sureness.

For all its stated antiquity and abundantly described architecture, let alone the fatuity of its principals, St. Stevens College itself seems the least success of the book’s creations. It appears over-lit, like reality in a television drama. The Lynley-Havers badinage is forced and less interesting than either character alone.

But in its more general texturing and in the interplay of its transient characters, the new book sustains the high standard Elizabeth George has set for herself.

Skinny, the New Orleans detective who is the central figure in James Colbert’s All I Have Is Blue (Atheneum: $20; 280 pp.), has the maddening literary habit of talking about himself in the third person. (“ ‘This is Skinny,’ Skinny said.”), but at least he acknowledges the habit, explaining that as a policeman you write reports in the third person (well, OK), then adding that calling himself Skinny gives a little distance from himself, as when he is contemplating a particularly cruel and gruesome murder. That makes more sense.

Skinny and his partner-lover Ruth, taking an afternoon off on the Mississippi, witness a boat explosion and rescue the son of the skipper, who’s been killed. The boy, Dwayne, disappears, and proves to have been both resourceful and wise. Just as well, since he’s a witness the bad guys want dead. Drugs are involved and Ruth is almost a victim before Skinny sorts it all out, in Colbert’s brisk and effectively atmospheric story, which the endangered boy runs off with.

Pennies on a Dead Woman’s Eyes (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 297 pp.) is the 13th of the Sharon McCone series which began in 1977 with “Edwin of the Iron Shoes” and with which author Marcia Muller launched the vogue of women writing about women as private eyes, a genre now including Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky among several others.

Like Ross Macdonald, Muller almost always finds the roots of present crime buried in the past, and indeed McCone is this time re-investigating a murder done 36 years before, ostensibly by a woman just now out of prison. The woman’s daughter hires McCone to reopen the file.

There are high-placed suspects and murderous attempts to stop the investigation. Muller (herself a lawyer who never practiced) and McCone, investigator for a small co-op law firm in San Francisco, are beginning to get the attention they deserve, and the new book is a fine and characteristic place for new readers to discover them.

David Martin, who wrote the splendidly eccentric novel “The Crying Heart Tattoo” several years ago, last year wrote an uncommonly chilling piece of crime fiction, centering on a killer bent on a particular revenge, called “Lie to Me.” Now, in Bring Me Children (Random House: $16; 289 pp.), Martin has written a modern but truly Gothic horror tale set in and about the West Virginia farm country where Martin, formerly a trade-journal editor in Washington, D.C., now raises thoroughbreds.

A doctor, blinded by a brain tumor, has gone mad, terrorized a town, recruited an ex-hooker and a 300-pound sheriff’s deputy as willing slaves and committed multiple murders. His adversaries include a retarded dwarf who raises killer dogs, a gorgeous black psychologist trying to avenge, with the aid of some Hoodoo magic, her grandmother’s suicide, and a TV anchorman recovering from a nervous breakdown on camera. That about covers it. Not for the tender-stomached but impossible to abandon once you’ve read a page or two.

S. L. (Sid) Stebel’s The Boss’s Wife (Walker: $21.95; 227 pp.) takes a while to get its plot going and bring its central character, computer whiz Jack Noble, into focus. But, hitting its stride, it builds to a smashing finale with about as many twists as a telephone cord.

Noble, who has been dipping into the company till electronically to finance some bets, gets a new boss who seems to be wise to him. The boss’s sexy wife and Noble are soon acting ignobly, the steam rising from the page. Events close in, truths are revealed and Jack may or may not have seen the error of his computations. The setting, in all its smoggy glory, is Los Angeles.

When he died in 1990, Elliott Roosevelt reportedly left unfinished jottings for several more stories featuring his mother, Eleanor, as sleuth. The first of these posthumous works, Murder in the Red Room (St. Martins Press: $18.95; 249 pp.), is at hand.

It is one of the best and most amusing of the 11 in the series. The victim is a Cleveland gangster and how did he get into the Red Room and who killed him there, and why? As before, the real charm of the book is the evocation of real history (Amelia Earhart appears, and F.D.R. ponders taking a dirigible ride), and especially the quality of life in the White House. Elliott R. deals again with the awful food. His mother neatly solves the crime, if not the food problem.

For a quick change of time and place, there is Michael Pierce’s The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 265 pp.), which is set in 1908 Cairo. The Mamur Zapt is the chief political officer of the police department, an Englishman. The Donkey-Vous are the boys who operate the donkey carts outside the great tourist hotels. They help solve some inexplicable disappearances, failed kidnapings as they prove to be.

The book is not as intriguing as its title, but it is undeniably exotic.