CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The 12 years Joe Gores spent as a private eye in San Francisco enrich his fictions novels wonderfully. In 32 Cadillacs (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 337 pp.) Gores has written one of any year’s funniest crime novels.

A group of Gypsies gathers in the Bay Area to work a massive and ingenious one-day scam, buying 32 Cadillacs, all with bad checks. Daniel Kearny Associates, a repossession firm evidently resembling Gores’ old employers, becomes the collective protagonist of the tale, trying to retrieve all the stolen horsepower.

The caper, involving as it does a multiplicity of subplots and a wide cast of characters, recalls another comic masterpiece, “Dancing Aztecs,” by Gores’ pal Donald E. Westlake, which involved a similar quest for an accidentally dispersed carton of gem-stuffed clay figurines. Fittingly, Westlake’s burglar hero Dortmunder does an amusing walk-on late in Gores’ book.

Gores has researched a good deal of lore on the Romany Gypsies (who may well not be appreciative). One of the subplots involves the king of the tribe, who is ostensibly dying and has said he wishes to be buried in the pink Caddy in which he rode to his coronation. The contenders for his title vie to find and present the pink car as emblematic of their claim to the throne.

It’s a work of large and breathtaking invention, wicked pace and delirious cross-cutting--a rare holiday treat.

Philip Friedman’s Inadmissible Evidence (Donald I. Fine: $23; 548 pp.) weighs as much as a good-sized salmon, thereby qualifying as monumental. A rich, self-made Puerto Rican developer in Manhattan is being re-tried for the bloody murder of his mistress-associate. The all-too-credible background is of street demonstrations rising out of ethnic resentments against the white establishment.

The assistant D.A. prosecuting the case, Joe Estrada, is also part- Hispanic. He finds how thin the original case was; some of the new evidence he turns up may indeed be inadmissible. The book is 329 pages along before we even get to trial, and the verdict is another 200-plus pages away. So it goes, meticulously, relentless, a juridical procedural that is somehow hypnotically interesting.

The line between determinations of guilt or innocence never seemed more fragile and ambiguous and yet, by whatever margin, Friedman suggests justice is served.

Tony Gibbs, a sometime editor at both the New Yorker and Yachting magazine, writes terrifically well about the world of charter sailing. Gillian Verdean, heroine of his first novel, “Dead Run,” returns in Landfall (Morrow: $20; 251 pp.), and sets off with an odd pair of customers, a mysterious colonel and a mistress with whom his relationship is peculiarly distant.

The plot, which eventually imperils skipper, crew and passengers alike, leads to a tiny Caribbean island taken over by terrorists who hope to use it as a base for a hijacking intended to be a televised and bloody attention-getter for their cause.

Gibbs’ high skill at describing action on either land or sea evokes the work of such other masters as Geoffrey Household and Dick Francis. The doings are very readable, stopping well short of being worrisomely credible.

Jerome Doolittle, once a PR man at the U.S. embassy in Laos and later a Jimmy Carter speechwriter, now does novels about Tom Bethany, once a coach of the Harvard wrestling team and presently a sort of freelance troubleshooter.

His previous titles, “Body Scissors” and “Strangle Hold,” lead naturally to Bear Hug (Pocket Books: $20; 232 pp.), in which Bethany volunteers to help a bunch of Cambridge oldsters who invested their life savings in a Texas S&L; that went belly-up amid the dank aromas of fraud. The fraud centers on a Keating clone, Dr. Denton Somerville (inevitably known as Dr. Denton), who evidently did himself in when his pyramid collapsed.

While Doolittle’s style and the primary Boston setting bring Robert B. Parker to mind, Doolittle’s political angers more strongly recall the mini-essays John D. MacDonald used to plant in his Travis McGee stories.

Who but Doolittle might cite Albert Jay Nock (1873-1945) and his “Memoirs of an Ambiguous Man” (1943)? “As against a Jesus,” Nock wrote, “the historic choice of the mass-man goes regularly to some Barrabas.” Nock thought about doing a humorous essay on how to recognize the Dark Ages when you’re in them.

“You’re in them,” Bethany answers to himself, “when your country is hipdeep in yellow ribbons and the only sensible voices left come from Russell Baker and ‘Doonesbury’ and ‘Saturday Night Live.’ ”

The plot is serviceable, with a dandy finish, but the real pleasure is in savoring Doolittle’s anger, at the whole S&L; mess and all it symbolizes for him.

Publishers are far from unaware that Christmas is at hand. An unusual item is The Benediction of Brother Cadfael (Mysterious Press: $35; 348 pp.), which reprints the first two novels in Ellis Peters’ 18-title series on the 12th-Century monk-sleuth at Shrewbury Abbey, with the novels flanking a charming and handsomely illustrated essay by Rob Talbot and Robin Whiteman on what the authors call “Cadfael Country: Shropshire and the Welsh Borders.”

Rather different is The Christmas Crimes at Puzzel Manor by Simon Brett (Delacorte: $15; 184 pp.), in which a bizarre assortment of guests (echoes of “And Then There Were None”) is snowbound at a country resort. A murderer has struck once and will again. He leaves a series of cryptic clues to his identity to tease a crippled ex-Yard man who is one of the guests. The boggling puzzles are luckily explained a chapter later. All very silly, but the clues are quite fiendishly clever, and Brett is, as always, a writer of most excellent wit.

For the insatiable, Crime at Christmas, edited by Richard Dalby (St. Martin’s: $ 18.95; 288 pp.) offers cruel Yule deeds from authors as disparate in time as Wilkie Collins and H. P. Keating, with Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.