CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Protagonists in crime fiction, male and female, bend the rules, break the law and raise hob with the Ten Commandments, but almost always in the hope of punishing the culprits, seeing justice done and restoring order.

Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is a refreshing exception to such high purposes. He is a multiple murderer, a forger, an adroit liar and impersonator and, withal, a psychopath in that he is largely although not totally free of remorse for the dreadful things he has done in the name of a prosperous survival.

Ripley first came before us in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1955 and now makes his fifth appearance in Ripley Under Water (Knopf: $21; 309 pp.). First time out he murdered his friend Dickie Greenfield and forged his will to achieve Belle Ombre, a splendid house near Fontainebleau, where he paints, gardens, takes lessons on the harpsichord, enjoys his beautiful heiress wife Heloise and lives with the understandably paranoid fear that his lethal past will catch up with him.

The fear seems entirely justified in the new book, when a peculiar American couple take a house a few doors away and begin, quite tauntingly, to spy on Ripley. The man even trails the Ripleys on a North American holiday. Later the man and a helper drag canals around Fontainebleau for traces of yet another unsolved disappearance in which, as constant readers know, Ripley had a hand.

The five Ripleys are, in fact, a kind of multipart novel, although each of the books stands alone, Highsmith providing clues to what has gone before, the matter of the painter Derwatt and the forgeries and the dead forger, for examples. Graham Greene spoke, very aptly, of Highsmith’s “claustrophobic and irrational world,” which he greatly admired.

Ripley has been filmed twice, as “Purple Noon” in 1959 with Alain Delon as Tom, and in 1977 as “The American Friend,” with Dennis Hopper as Tom.

Repellent as his deeds are, Ripley has the charm of the likable scoundrel, who loves his wife and good craftsmanship and who, as Highsmith says of him someplace, does not believe in murder unless it is absolutely necessary. Statesmen have been honored for no less a belief, which may well relate to Highsmith’s highly contrarian vision of life.

She is an elegant writer and a truly ingenious plotter, and each book ends with a degree of tentativeness, Tom’s alibis not quite airtight, witnesses to the truth whose silence cannot be totally guaranteed. The suspense never ends, for Tom or the reader, and the suspicion lurks that a last adventure awaits in which the Ripley luck will run out. Given Highsmith’s taste for irony, he will probably for once be blameless and attempting something honorable.

The new book is a lesser item in the series, the test of wills oddly soft-focused. But then again, there is nothing else quite like this book or its predecessors, or Tom, or the Texas-born, Switzerland-dwelling Patricia Highsmith.

The big-push book of the moment (and not without reason, either) is Nancy Taylor Rosenberg’s Mitigating Circumstances (Dutton: $20; 364 pp.), already bought for the movies and a book-club main selection.

The author is a former policewoman and her setting is Ventura County, just south of Sue Grafton country. Her heroine is an ambitious assistant district attorney, Lily Forester, her marriage dead and her teen-aged daughter in rebellion, both relationships casualties of her ambition.

Then mother and daughter are raped by an intruder, very possibly a young Latino she has sent to jail. Too aware of how rape cases are handled, Forester takes shotgun in hand, tracks the released prisoner and blows him away. It is a startling premise and Rosenberg develops it with skill that would credit an experienced novelist, though this is her debut.

A detective, who moved here not long ago from Omaha and is appalled by what he finds as the top-to-bottom decay in Southern California life, pursues the case relentlessly. The tragedy has brought mother and daughter close again, but provided new horrors for Forester to cope with. Rosenberg’s familiarity with both the police and the courts gives the story a strong veneer of reality. The ending is both intricate and satisfying.

Samuel H. Pillsbury is a Los Angeles lawyer who joins the lengthening list of lawyers writing very good fiction. His Conviction (Walker: $21.95; 213 pp.) is another first novel.

Walter Buris, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, is trying a hotshot television producer on various charges of drug possession and corrupting the morals of minors.

It’s tricky because the hotshot, Ted Jeffries, has had good publicity running a shelter for runaways (but did he give them drugs and use them in porno flicks?) and he has friends in high places. Just how high, Buris learns to his bitter sorrow. By the end he has lost his case and his job. Except that it’s not the end; Pillsbury has an extremely dramatic coda to get to, and he plays it with flair.

Pillsbury also creates a notably loathesome trial judge and echoes the McMartin trial in his sensitive exploration of how alleged child-abuse victims can be manipulated to say what prosecutors want to hear.

David C. Hall is a Wisconsin-born American who has been living in Barcelona and publishing novels and short stories in Spanish there for nearly 20 years. Return Trip Ticket (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 146 pp.), with an introduction by Donald E. Westlake, is, surprisingly, his first book in English. Not a moment too soon, either.

He writes in the private-eye tradition, a spiritual descendant of Dashiell Hammett, even to the same overweight and illusion-free operator--the mean streets’ tarnished knight of legend, being both tarnished and knightly in comparable measures.

The op, Wilson, is sent to Barcelona to fetch back a young woman of good (e.g. wealthy) American family who has fallen among questionable and probably evil European companions.

Hall intercuts expertly between present (Wilson locates the girl and she is ready enough to get the hell out of there) and the past (the trail that led to her, and the evidence that she really is in trouble on both sides of the law). Heading for Los Angeles, the op and the girl are being nastily pursued and, in lean, tough prose of the noir tradition, Hall creates both suspense and a sympathetic portrait of the young woman.

The last-page denouement is a stunner, and the whole book suggests that more of Hall’s work should be repatriated, and fast.

John Lutz is a prolific veteran of the private-eye field. In Spark (Holt, $19.95, 243 pp.) he continues the adventures of Fred Carver, an ex-policeman disabled by a gunshot-wrecked leg and now a PI. A widow at a retirement community near Orlando hires him to check out the death of her husband, felled by a heart attack. There’s no history of heart trouble, a recent checkup in fact having pronounced him in enviable health.

The widow is a fine and stalwart sort, one of a galaxy of vivid characters, among them a monster-large and sadistic villain and a head nurse who makes Nurse Ratchett of “Cuckoo’s Nest” look like Apple Annie.

Lutz, who lives near St. Louis, also knows Florida and conveys well its special ambience of steam and seniority. The grand finale proves that as always it’s best to be wary of petards, lest you be hoisted by your own.

Richard Condon of “The Manchurian Candidate” and the Prizzi trilogy has an imagination that grows wilder instead of tamer as the years roll by. He stands now as the Proust of the preposterous, the Flaubert of the flabbergasting and so alliteratively on.

His latest is The Venerable Bead (St. Martin’s: $21.95; 294 pp.), a grand and punning title referring to a possibly magical jewel worn by his dubious heroine, Leila Aluja (a name itself faintly hinting of a Handelian pun). Leila, in a typical Condon summation, “had risen from demonstrating prepacked lunch techniques at a trade school in Dearborn, MI, to becoming head of the world’s largest fast-food conglomerate” and owns five Frank Lloyd Wright houses and a $12- million Bugatti, stored in a cave in Indiana.

Condon has fetishes about weird names and precise numbers and is unable to write a casual sentence. The bead is valued at $1,483,700. Leila was temporarily a singer named Meine Edelfrau, whose biggest hit, “Nobody Stands Alone,” a sequel to her first hit, “I Stand Alone,” sold 7,450,000 copies.

She was later a lawyer for the National Gun Carriers Assn. and CANCER (Center for American National Cigarette Education and Research). That was before the fast- food trade caught her eye.

Of a male character, Condon writes with characteristic verve, “His ankles flopped as if he were dealing cards with his feet.” At one moment in the hyper-convoluted plot, more than 300 Hollywood agents are arrested and jailed, leaving, Condon reports, “only three people in Hollywood who knew how to make deals, get the right tables in restaurants, actually read a script or help an actor write a letter home to mother. . . . This accounted for such movies as ‘Ishtar,’ ‘Hudson Hawk’ and ‘Howard the Duck.’ ”

Condon, in his innocent youth a studio publicist, does know how to zing for his supper. He calls the book “A Deadly Serious Novel” and it can be said to aim a high-caliber Swiftian satire at governments, lobbyists, Cold War relics, greed in all its manifestations, tobacco, guns, covert operations and fast food.

It is just that deadly serious fiction is seldom so mined with chortles, hoots and thigh-slappers.

Lovers of crime fiction should welcome warmly a softcover reprint of the late Howard Haycraft’s classic 1946 anthology about the genre, The Art of the Mystery Story (Carroll & Graf: $15.95; 565 pp.). It contains, beyond Haycraft’s own essays, defenses of the form by Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers and attacks upon it including Edmund Wilson’s “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”

There are gems, often alluded to elsewhere but seldom read in full, of which one of the shiniest is Msgr. Ronald Knox’s “Detective Story Decalogue,” ground rules for mystery-writing of which Article IV is “No hitherto undiscovered poison may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.”

The oath of London’s Detection Club (which still exists) extracts its own set of promises from new members, warning that if the promises are broken, “may other writers anticipate your plots . . . may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish. Amen.”

Amen. A grand shelf item for browsing, justification and reference.