CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The Small Bang (Random House: $20; 265 pp.) is a mystery of sorts enveloped in a mystery of sorts. Its author, “Jack Fenno,” is the pseudonym of “a well-known literary figure,” say the publishers. His identity (if it be a he) will be disclosed just after Labor Day, presumably to the discomfiture of all the reviewers who have guessed wrong.

Crime fiction, curiously alluring to writers as well as to readers, is not infrequently published under noms de plume by blurb-described “best-selling authors” in other fields. The inference somehow is of a little literary slumming done as a reprieve from higher-domed labors.

What is distinctive about the Fenno book is that it is a serious, mildly satiric and very expertly written novel not really in need of the applied mystification.

A well-known theoretical physicist named Erich Sturmer has disappeared in an avalanche while on a skiing holiday in a small Alpine village with his wife, Chandra, the daughter of very rich parents from India. The body cannot be recovered until the spring thaw, if then, avalanches being as destructive as they are.

The Sturmers have been an Oxford triumvirate with an attorney, John Peake, who becomes the widow’s chief consoler. Peake, whose diffident, speculative personality infuses the book as much as does the missing- presumed-dead Sturmer, supplies intermittent chapters in the first-person.

He addresses Sturmer rhetorically and frets about the philosophical concerns that engaged Sturmer’s attention. He is a kind of co-protagonist doubling as a useful expository device. The book is nothing if not clever.

The mystery, of course--there is not any crime as such--is whether Sturmer really is dead or has used the accident of the avalanche to escape to a newly contemplative life, far from the small but madding crowd of his previous existence.

Meantime, Sturmer’s colleagues (read rivals ) hover like academic vultures, seeking custody of his notes and unpublished papers. The author reveals a nicely wicked wit in these matters. He also moves easily over the dense and disputed ground (explored by Fritof Capra among others) where particle physics meets Eastern mysticism in seeking the origins of the universe and an embracing universal truth. Big bang, small bang, no bang at all?

The novel becomes a work of intellectual suspense, which Fenno sustains handsomely, replete with rising suspicions and a body found and identified, though this well short of the end.

Who could have done it, there being a shortage of butlers who write? What the devil; let’s go for the gold whilst we’re about it. The familiarity with English academic life, with the confrontations of Anglo- and post-colonial Indian cultures, a handy way with metaphysical abstractions, a familiarity as well with the idea of a man who may be in quest of a new untethered life and, of course, a track record as a thoughtful and eloquent novelist--they all point teasingly to Salman Rushdie. And it honors whoever Fenno may be, if Rushdie he or she isn’t, to think that Rushdie he or she might have been.

James Sallis’ The Long-legged Fly (Carroll & Graf: $17.95; 200 pp.) is an extraordinary first novel by a poet, translator, short-story writer (and occasional contributor to the Book Review).

While it is identified as a crime novel and is indeed a first-person narrative by Lew Griffin, a private investigator in New Orleans (where Sallis presently lives), the book in its discontinuities of time and story is in fact a moving portrait of a thoughtful and well-read black man caught in that half- world between his own aspirations and the realities of the inhibiting society.

Although Sallis is justly compared to James Lee Burke (in his evocation of New Orleans) and to Raymond Chandler (in his updating of the private eye), the shelf on which his book earns a place is alongside James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

Griffin’s tough-guy private-eye talk keeps slipping like an ill-tied mask, revealing (as Sallis intends) the compassionate, distraught intellectual who ought to be teaching literature at the university level. He drinks far too much; it’s his only relief and it doesn’t work.

He solves a case, tracking down a missing black woman activist. He finds her, screaming and out of it, in a mental hospital. “Fame, pressures, loss of private time and life--what had done it to her?. . . . Finally, I guess, it wasn’t that much different from the way we all make up our lives by bits and pieces . . . improvising our way from day to day through the years we call a life.”

Griffin’s hope is to bottom out and fight his way to a real life for himself. Sallis offers hope for him in a work of eloquent economy that catches the steamy underbelly of New Orleans and the troubled soul of a good man in a hard land.

Another interesting but this time disappointing first novel is Eulogy for a Brown Angel (Arte Publico Press/University of Houston: $17.95; 189 pp.) by Lucha Corpi, an Oakland-based Chicana poet. The story spans 18 years, from the 1970 East Los Angeles riot, during which Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar was killed by a tear-gas projectile, to a violent finale in 1988.

An activist named Gloria Damasco finds a murdered child during the riot and becomes obsessed by a case the police cannot solve. A teen-aged gang-member witness, willing to help, is murdered before he can.

Two-thirds of the way along, the voice shifts from Damasco’s own to the third person. What seems clear is that it should have been one voice or the other throughout. In either voice, the style, for an admired poet, is perplexingly unvisual and insufficiently dramatic.

Yet Corpi obviously has deep and compassionate insights into the Hispanic community and its complexities, not least in the complications of its own roots. The Anglo world hardly figures in the book, which is refreshing. Another Corpi novel need not be crime-driven, and could be the more revealing and moving for it.

Jeremiah Healy is a professor of law in Boston and writes mysteries about a local investigator named John Cuddy, last seen training to run the marathon. In Shallow Graves (Pocket Books: $19; 258 pp.), Cuddy is retained by the insurance company which had once framed and fired him to check out a death claim on a beautiful young Eurasian model who has been strangled in her apartment.

Cuddy takes the case out of sympathy for an old colleague in the firm, but he smells a rat, and he’s right. The girl was the granddaughter of Boston’s preeminent mob figure and the daughter of the terrible-tempered present controller of the Family affairs. The Family wants her killer for its own application of justice. The insurance company is eager to keep its distance.

The ending, as surprising as endings ever get, is rich with irony and leaves Cuddy with a new pal, one Primo Zuppone, a Family lieutenant not eager for advancement. It is one of the better series.

John Grant, the London pathologist who writes as Jonathan Gash, continues the merry adventures of Lovejoy, the antiques expert who generally operates on the far side of the law, in The Lives of Fair Ladies (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 263 pp.).

Lovejoy (who has made his way onto British television) is a diviner of the real from the fake among antiques and his books are treasuries of information about the trade, most of it calculated to make you confine your shopping to K-Mart, where you can be sure. The language, which Jacques Barzun in his crime almanac dismisses as emetic, is actually exotic and special to the trade, demanding a glossary (not provided). The style is elusive, elliptical and highly amusing. Best to go with the flow and trust the sense will come clear ultimately.

On his home turf in East Anglia (lovingly described in all its damp austerity), pursued by creditors, by police investigating the looting of a great house and by an oversexed wife eager to dump hubby and elope to Monte Carlo with our man, Lovejoy is even more frenzied than usual. If possible, he is even more sexist in his deployment of women, whom he adores, although on a transient, leave-before-morning basis.

The plot involves theft on a grand scale and Lovejoy, embroiled by his expertise and motivated by fear and greed and other primal concerns, is as usual both detector and detected. In his bizarre way, Lovejoy is of all things a limited moralist, finding the only beauty in the truth of real things, even in the real fakes he turns out himself.

Smokey Brandon, the heroine of Noreen Ayres’ A World the Color of Salt (Morrow: $19; 301 pp.), is an ex-stripper who is now working forensics for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. She is as tough-spoken as the current women of crime get, but she is dismayed when the pleasant kid who sells her coffee and doughnuts at a fast-food shop is brutally gunned down in a two-bit holdup.

A complicated and violence-strewn path leads her to a crazy lady and her murderous sons and to a shoot-down worthy of the OK Corral. Ayres’ style works too hard at being tough and side-of-the-mouth clever, a frequent occupational hazard with first private-eye novels. (Ross Macdonald calmed down considerably, metaphorwise, in his later books.) But she tells a crisp story; she knows her turf and has carefully researched the workplace. It’s a promising debut.