CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Reginald Hill is a veteran, prolific and excellent English author of crime fiction who has written under at least three other names. His present series characters are Inspectors Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe. In Recalled to Life (Delacorte: $20; 359 pp.), Hill is using a familiar structure: the detective reexamining a case long closed and presumed settled.

Dalziel had been a rookie on this case, a murder during a 1963 weekend gathering in the country. Now a television series (hosted, conveniently, by a man who had as a child attended the fateful gathering with his parents) has raised questions about the verdict.

A nursemaid had been convicted of murdering her mistress. Now, after long imprisonment, she has been released while the handling of the case by Dalziel’s boss and mentor, long dead, is being scrutinized by a nasty and ambitious investigator from London. Dalziel makes his own inquiries, hoping to save his mentor’s memory from a posthumous stain.

The house party was obviously a can of worms, and 30 years later the squirming hasn’t stopped. The story is wonderfully convoluted, as present and past interweave and entangle. Hill, eloquent as well as ingenious, lets the TV host tellingly evoke the British world of 1963 (the John Profumo case, also starring Christine Keeler and Dr. Stephen Ward; the Beatles on the rise; the Great Train Robbery).

Hill and the alter-ego TV man have some by-the-way but pointed comments on the evolution of the Golden Age crime fiction of Agatha Christie into Raymond Chandler’s mean streets. In the real world, the host says, there were the optimistic dreams that died with John Kennedy.

“We who grew up in the sixties and seventies and came to our maturity in the dreadful eighties have seen the destruction of that dream without ever having had the joy of dreaming it.”

Not for the first time, the artifices of detective fiction have been the carriers of sharp and well-stated truths about our lives. A fine book.

Los Angeles author Rochelle Majer Krich’s Till Death Do Us Part (Avon: $4.99 paper; 290 pp.) takes as its unusual theme the anger and anguish of a wife in an Orthodox Jewish marriage whose husband will not give her a get , or religious divorce. Until he does she can’t remarry and is an agunah , a bound woman.

Deena Vogler’s husband, a vividly hateful creation, is cruel to the point of sadism, and it is something of a relief when he is done in. The question, naturally, is by whom, and the wife, initially a suspect, is finally under threat herself. The plotting is crisp, the story well told and involving, with the added interest of its unusual background. The faithful if painful adherence to tradition is oddly refreshing in a day when traditions fade so swiftly.

The emulations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the resurrections of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson continue unabated, a cottage industry within the mystery form. Few have been so meticulously researched as Edward B. Hanna’s The Whitechapel Horrors (Carroll & Graf: 19.95; 395 pp., including 28 pages of notes).

Hanna, a Peabody Award-winning journalist writing his first novel, chooses to pit Holmes against Jack the Ripper. The “source material” is a bundle of rough notes by Watson, lately discovered in a safe at Claridge’s Hotel. The telling is in the third person, rather than in Watson’s voice.

In the textual equivalent of those remarkable stills and newsreels in which Woody Allen appeared alongside historic figures in “Zelig,” Holmes and Watson step into the real Ripper murder scenes, with real Scotland Yard figures and such other personages as the Prince of Wales and, ravaged with syphilis, Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father.

Late 19th-Century London becomes extraordinarily real, and nothing is slier about Hanna’s melding of Holmes and the Ripper than his adroit resolution of a case on which history’s verdict has remained open.

Karen Kijewski, former English teacher, former bartender, won an award for the best first private-eye novel (with “Katwalk”). She has now written her fourth, Copy Kat (Doubleday: $18.50; 261 pp.).

Her heroine, bartender turned investigator Kat Colorado, still having nightmares after being forced to kill a man on a previous caper, goes back to bartending as a cover story while she looks into the death (in a presumed robbery) of the complicated young woman who was her godchild.

Kijewski tells a swift, unadorned story, propelled by sharp dialogue and marked by strong action that usually puts Kat at high risk. But Kat, like cats, is well-supplied with lives.

Two of the best of the tough-guy, soft-heart writers show up this month. In Boneyards (Pocket Books: $21; 330 pp.), Robert Campbell (“Alice in La-La Land”) does a long flashback about a Chicago detective just being released from the penitentiary after serving 14 years for murdering his black hooker mistress.

The backstory begins just after Mayor Richard Daley has died and the fight for succession is on. The Candidate (never named) wants to make police corruption an issue. Ray Sharkey looks the perfect target, a cop on the take. An epileptic daughter in an institution, a wife slowly dying of cancer in another, you meet the bills however you can, and Sharkey has.

His whole family has been dysfunctional: mother a suicide, one sister a wandering hooker, a brother a cripple. Yet the ties, stretched taut, never quite break and there is in Sharkey a yearning for something else--lost pride, love, forgiveness, human warmth--that gives the story a remarkable resonance.

The portrait of Chicago, cops, politics, gin mills, is almost lyrically corrosive. The sainted names of Bathhouse John Coughlan and Hinky-Dink Kenna, co-alderman of the infamous First Ward for a half-century, occur in these pages. Campbell, not too surprisingly, lives in Carmel.

Lawrence Block continues the adventures of Matt Scudder, ex-detective, recovering alcoholic and unlicensed investigator, in A Walk Among the Tombstones (Morrow: $17; 318 pp.).

His capers tend toward the grisly, almost needlessly so. This time a drug trafficker’s wife is kidnaped and, although a ransom is paid, she is killed and butchered. It is an almost clueless crime, but Scudder, patiently digging and helped by a team of hackers and a streetwise black teen-ager, locates the culprits. The ending is tense and grimly retributive.

But the appeal of Block’s series, more and more, is less the caper than the interior portrait of Scudder himself, talking about the process of recovery with his fellow sufferers, winning his battles, however narrowly.

Like Campbell, Block portrays a bleak world of lower-depth violence and generalized inhumanity. Yet their worlds are redeemed by glimmerings--sometimes more than that--of love, concern and even, as at a gray day’s dawning, hope.

Susanna Hofmann McShea’s The Pumpkin-Shell Wife (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 311 pp.) reunites four senior citizens who solved their first case in “Hometown Heroes.” Now they invade Manhattan, where a hometown woman, seemingly a model of propriety, has been murdered in a cheap hotel, registered under a phony name and dressed like a hooker. The woman’s teen-age son thinks something is fishy, as well he might.

Deceptions are ripped away, sad truth is found and the likable foursome work their way to a psychologically valid denouement. A promising series.

A mother-daughter mystery-writing succession is rare and possibly unprecedented. But, with Decked (Warner Books: $17.95; 230 pp.) Carol Higgins Clark follows in mother Mary’s footsteps. Having helped edit and research her mother’s novels, Carol seems inevitably a very close facsimile.

Her heroine, Regan Riley, is a private eye whose mother--believe it--is a mystery writer and whose father runs funeral parlors. The 10-year-old murder of Riley’s Oxford roommate haunts a 1992 ocean cruise on which Riley is bodyguarding an eccentric English grande dame.

Fellow passengers are practically a murderer’s row of suspicious types. It is all fast, glamorous, intricately plotted and serenely untroubling, just right for a plane ride or, indeed, a cruise.

Robert A. Carter, a veteran publishing-industry editor, writes about the world of book publishing in Casual Slaughters (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 266 pp.). A gossipy biographer (for whom one or more real-life counterparts suggest themselves) is done in and his last manuscript about an imperious star actor (for whom ditto) proves elusive. This is worrying to the protagonist publisher, who describes himself as looking like a cross between Orson Welles as Falstaff and Edward VII at his coronation.

The mystery as such is translucent, if not transparent, but the local color is amusing, not least the portrait of another author, ungrateful wretch, trying to extort a richer contract.