BOOK REVIEW : When the Potboiler and Literary Meet : CRY ME A RIVER, by T. R. Pearson ; Henry Holt; $21.95; 258 pages

If “Cry Me a River” were categorized by plot, it would be termed a police procedural.

There’s a corpse, that of a blowhard policeman, Wendle, found shot to death in the woods; a motive, in the shape of a photograph secreted in Wendle’s wallet showing a naked young woman with a come-hither look; a number of suspects, men discovered to have consorted with the mysterious temptress in the past, and an investigator, the officer who stumbled across the glossy evidence of Wendle’s secret love life as well as the body itself.

It is this unnamed officer who narrates “Cry Me a River,” and it’s evident from the novel’s first page that the plot is chiefly a means through which to sketch the underside of Southern, small-town life.

There’s some slight mystery, duly solved, as to the killer’s identity, but the deeper, perpetual mystery is the sexual magnetism of certain women--in this case, as we are told in the book’s opening sentence, a woman called Red “who wasn’t even much of a beauty, wasn’t possessed herself of the manner of features and accouterments and contours that a fellow might conjure up and savor.”

Red, the narrator tells us, “wasn’t tall and leggy, wasn’t terribly shapely at all, had a nose that was flat and a little canted off to one side and small deep-set eyes the color of silt,” yet had “a way of moving her head to pitch her hair about, a way of sweeping it off of her face with her fingers that was, I suppose, affecting.”

The writing in “Cry Me A River” is not, obviously, typical of the police procedural, nor is the cop-narrator. But it works, for T. R. Pearson has produced in the novel an interesting hybrid of the potboiler and the literary. If the novel’s first sentence sets the story’s tone, Pearson’s description of the killer, supplied near the tale’s close, captures its higher moral vision.

“He wasn’t, I don’t think, evil,” says the narrator. “I don’t even believe he was mean. He just happened instead to be empty, had managed to get somehow cored. Where we are the most of us guilt and shame, avarice and longing, he was chiefly disregard.”

It’s tempting to pile up quotes from the novel, for Pearson’s prose is languid and circumlocutory, full of prolonged detours and asides.

A man faints as if someone had “reached down his throat and snatched out his skeleton”; a coffin is “unduly showy, busy most especially about the lid with brightwork and relief, nearly everything short of a brass knocker.”

Somewhat more seriously, the narrator confesses that “I just happen to count ambivalence as probably my favorite emotion, and I’m often given to finding a way to run hot and cold together”; later he quotes Red justifying her man-hunting ways by saying, succinctly, “Either you go round policing or you stand to get policed.”

These are choice moments, where Pearson--author of five previous novels, the best known being “A Short History of a Small Place”--strikes the perfect balance between comic language and serious subject.

He doesn’t always, however: The ongoing joke about the narrator’s dog having gas, and the novel’s constant digressions, grow tiresome. After a while it’s easy to wonder whether the book is about passion and jealousy or writing for writing’s sake, and at that point you begin to resist Pearson’s charms, just as the narrator resists Red’s.

In the end, though, you have to forgive Pearson his excesses, for “Cry Me a River” is so frequently gentle, bright, and on target.

The narrator says at one point, “I’ve known any number of fellows who could evermore work up the energy to marshal and manage altogether baroque fabrications when it came to a larceny or a simple assault but who grew invariably and utterly transparent when there proved to be some woman in the mix,” and you know it’s true.

Red and her ilk don’t really mean to turn men inside out; it’s just one of those things that happens in the never-ending skirmish between the sexes.