CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The one advantage of discovering a writer late is that there’s a waiting backlist of titles to catch up on. On the strength of the English novelist Liza Cody’s Bucket Nut (Doubleday: $18.50: 236 pp.) I’ll search out “Backhand” and the other Anna Lee private-eye titles. Cody is startlingly original, writes terrific dialogue and first-person narrative and combines toughness with rare sensibility.

The new book introduces an engrossing anti-heroine who sounds too contrived to be true: an extra-large woman who lives in an abandoned house trailer in a wrecking yard (of which she is night watchperson), steals cars the way ordinary folk take cabs and is working her way up the lower rungs of professional wrestling.

How Cody makes Eva Wylie credible, and sympathetic, is probably no clearer than how John D. MacDonald made Travis McGee credible, but the piling up of supportive detail helps. Wylie and her sister, abandoned by an alcoholic mother, ran a hard gamut of social workers, police and foster homes.

The sister, whom Wylie hasn’t seen in years but envisions as a captive waiting to be rescued, actually found loving foster parents; Wylie has been a runaway, scrabbling on her own, eking out a mean living by street smarts and brawn. But she retains a battered but undefeated optimism despite a mistrusting cynicism, not unjustified, about almost everyone and everything in the world in which she moves.

She is, on one acquaintance, unforgettable, and the writing recalls London as evoked by Colin MacInnes and George Orwell, with a gritty humor that suggests early Elmore Leonard.

The plot catches her inadvertently in a turf war involving small-time but deadly black and Chinese interests, a middle-class girl whose slumming has got out of hand and a wrestling match (toward which the story builds with most crafty suspense) that will put Wylie either on the map or in a body bag.

Cody studied at the Royal Academy of Art and worked at Madame Tussaud’s before turning to writing, so the jacket says. She lives in Somerset, and is something else.

Misgivings sank the now-legendary McMartin School cases. Could children testify without psychological harm to themselves? Could children be manipulated to say what adults wanted to hear? Could reality and fantasy become indistinguishable in very young minds?

The misgivings are at the heart of Harold Mehling’s wrenchingly good courtroom thriller, Admission of Guilt (Carroll & Graf: $21; 287 pp.). Mehling is a former journalist and publisher who, unlike so many authors these days, is not himself a lawyer.

A young nursery-school teacher in Upstate New York is indicted for child molestation and her defense is handed to a local lawyer more familiar with mortgages than criminal-court work. Tensions run high in the town (Mehling is very good on the fear-hatred among parents who are eager to convict, or to lynch).

The judge is less judge than co-prosecutor, hamstringing the defense, haranguing the defendant. The young woman is convicted, and almost killed while in custody. But that’s not the end; there’s a forward story and, of course, a back story. Why is the judge so injudicial, almost suicidally so for a man hoping for a seat on the Court of Appeals?

Mehling’s plot gathers momentum like an avalanche, and the book’s last scenes unreel with furious speed. But always underlying the action are the quieter considerations about the children, their welfare and their believability--not because they willfully lie but because they are so eager to please adults. As in the McMartin case, there remains a haze of uncertainty over the root matter of guilt and innocence, and whether justice was done or undone.

The book is thrilling to read, sobering to think about.

Julian Symons, now past 80, is the dean of English mysterians, a double-threat man who creates mysteries wonderfully and writes about them incisively. He is represented in both guises this month.

His Something Like a Love Affair (Mysterious Press: $17.95; 199 pp.) is a wickedly elegant novella about a proper but intolerably bored young housewife married to an architect; the personal and professional lives of both hold unsettling surprises.

A friend naughtily suggests that something like a love affair on the side might ease the wife’s boredom, and she is soon taking a refresher course with her young driving instructor. Soon more lethal ambitions enter the picture . . . but that is Symons’ story, and he weaves it to a fine, last-page snapper.

In 1972, Symons first published his personal but uniquely well-informed survey of crime fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Robert B. Parker. Now he has done a third and, he insists, final updating and revision of Bloody Murder (Mysterious: $21.95; 347 pp.), with a new long chapter on the ‘90s.

The book, Symons says, is meant to stimulate “reasoned contradiction” among crime-fiction enthusiasts, although he is so reasonable and informative to begin with that contradiction comes hard.

He is, for example, very high indeed on P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, and argues that the first two novels Rendell wrote as Barbara Vine, “A Dark-Adapted Eye” and “A Fatal Inversion,” are “among the most memorable and original crime stories of the century.”

He is also high on George V. Higgins, an artist, Symons argues, beside whom Scott Turow is simply “a skilled artisan.” The superviolent current, in American crime fiction particularly, he dislikes intensely. The writings of James Ellroy and Andrew Vachss, he says, are in effect “strip cartoons with captions replacing the drawings.”

On the other hand, he admires Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and Loren D. Estleman and his series character, Amos Walker. What he had hoped for as he wrote his book in 1972, Symons says, was to urge that the best crime stories be considered as serious imaginative fictions rather than a frivolous detour. “And this,” he says, “has happened.”

Indeed, in this as in most months, the best work in the field has claims to be contemplated as social history and commentary, as well as entertainment.

A hard-swinging Southern California writer, Robert Ferrigno, made an lively first appearance with “The Horse Latitudes.” In The Cheshire Moon (Morrow: $20; 282 pp.), he invades that show- business world where greed and ambition are endemic, and politics are the perpetual lure of the power that lies beyond fame.

His protagonist, Quinn, an investigative journalist, has just been recruited by the Italian entrepreneur who owns a hip expose magazine that represents its own kind of power.

Ferrigno’s inventions include a corn-pone talk-show hostess whose hubby has senatorial ambitions, and a smiling, dimwit killer, one of the nastier thugs of recent memory. The mastodon persuades a Quinn informant to kill himself (as being preferable to the torturous alternative), thus setting the plot in motion.

Ferrigno has a gift for creating confrontations of high impact (e.g., the suicide beneath an approach path at LAX) and his dialogue bites hard. The moon of the title is the horizontal sliver of the waning phase. It scares Quinn’s moppet daughter and, given the events that take place beneath it, it should.

Like other inheritors of the Hammett-Chandler-Ross Macdonald private-eye tradition (of which the investigative reporter is himself an inheritor), Ferrigno balances the tough doings with a strong sense of moral outrage and a compassion that reacts to and does not simply report the often ghastly occurrences of the plot.

John Lescroart is a Los Angeles writer who introduced Dismas Hardy, a sometime San Francisco lawyer who was then a bartender and occasional private eye. In Hard Evidence (Donald I. Fine: $21.95; 478 pp.), Hardy is back at law, working as an assistant DA in San Francisco, but holding on to part- ownership of a bar in case things slow down.

When an ailing shark, brought to an aquarium, dies and is autopsied, the innards contain a man’s hand and, on one finger, a gaudy jade ring. The hand belongs to a Silicon Valley millionaire, the rest of whom turns up subsequently. It is breathtaking, as beginnings go.

Lescroart, who believes in full value, e.g. convoluted plots unfolded with passion, has Hardy prosecute two suspects, a Japanese mistress who is acquitted, and a Superior Court judge, Hardy’s former father-in-law who, as it turns out, didn’t do it either.

Matters are settled out of court, so to speak, with a noodge from Hardy and the unraveling of a back story that proves to be decadent, poisonous and sad. But Hardy himself, in love, and with his own human values solid and intact, remains an attractive protagonist.

The ever-prolific Stuart M. Kaminsky, inventor among other things of a series featuring a Moscow detective named Rostnikov, has a new series about a Chicago cop named Abe Lieberman. His second caper, Lieberman’s Choice (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 214 pp.), is essentially a one-event suspense story.

A fellow cop has shot his wife and her lover (still another cop) and then barricaded himself on the apartment rooftop, threatening to blow the neighborhood to bits unless an officer who had also seduced his wife comes to see him (and presumably be killed for his misdeeds).

It is somehow up to Lieberman to defuse the situation. Kaminsky salts the plot with plenty of local color while various ploys are tried and the suspense builds. Indeed, as in Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small stories, the local color all but conceals the thin main melody.

Nancy Pickard, whose Jenny Cain mysteries are good reading, agreed to finish a book begun by another writer, Virginia Rich, before her untimely death. Rich’s three earlier books, including “The Baked Bean Supper Murders,” were strewn with workable recipes.

The 27 Ingredient Chile Con Carne Murders (Delacorte: $18; 299 pp.) features Rich’s culinary heroine, Eugenia Potter, visiting a ranch she owns but seldom visits in the Southwest, where the chile can be hot but is not regularly fatal. But, as you might well expect, evil is afoot, land development is the motif, and death con carne is only one of the trials Ms. Potter has to face.

The recipes are there, including the 27-ingredient chile (“Note: Freezes wonderfully”). Not for all tastes, to coin a phrase, but a comfortably cozy read, if hard on diets.

Like Virginia Rich, John Harris, who wrote under his own name and also as Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy, died in 1991 but left two finished manuscripts. One of them is Pel and the Promised Land (St. Martin’s: $17.95; 220 pp.), one of the Mark Hebden series featuring Chief Inspector Pel of a fictional city somewhere in Burgundy.

Land development is the motif in Burgundy as well. Foreigners--the British, Germans, Dutch and occasional Yanks--are snapping up good French land, resorting to arson and other ploys when the locals won’t sell. The English wife of a dotty old baron has come to an abrupt end, and Pel’s researches lead to nests of unpleasant and dangerous speculators. Hebden/Harris provides plenty of action, including a chase by night on Lake Geneva.

Yet the appeal of the book is that the author comes as close to Simenon as anyone in invoking ordinary life, here in the provinces rather than Paris, but good to the last marc.