CRIMINAL PURSUITS

C. Constantine is the well-guarded nom de mystery of an author said to be a newspaper editor in a small Pennsylvania city. His nine previous novels, the last, “Sunshine Enemies,” in 1990, follow the adventures of Mario Balzic, the half-Italian, half-Hungarian police chief in a small Pennsylvania city, which the author knows at least as intimately as a cop might.

The eagerly-awaited new Constantine, Bottom Liner Blues (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 250 pp.) confirms what a trend-spotter might have said two or three titles ago, that the sensitive writer Constantine is has grown steadily more interested in Balzic’s soul than in whatever crime he confronts.

There is indeed a mystery, with a beginning, middle and violent end. A strange, almost demonic hill-country woman warns Balzic that her violent husband is probably going to kill a man he thinks is his rival. But the plot is a thin thread through Balzic’s angry ruminations about many things, including the economic depression in his Rockford, Pa., city, mostly the result of plant abandonments by two multinational corporations.

Then there are his memories of Anzio, nightmares that hit during waking hours almost like epileptic attacks. And his wife’s growing resentment of his inability to communicate with her. Perhaps most tellingly of all (as a possible projection of the author’s own Angsts ), Balzic has very, very long conversations with an eccentric local writer who has been published and well-reviewed but lives below the poverty level and complains eloquently about the state of the book business, the city, state, nation and world.

Its long dialogues and equally long interior monologues are wildly off-trail in terms of customary expectations in the form, although they are often funny, with a tape-recorder verisimilitude. Balzic and his world are so real and so credible that at last the novel is extremely affecting, and renewed proof that Constantine by any name is a terrific writer. There is, incidentally, more than a glimmer of light at the end of Balzic’s grim tunnel.

Yet another pseudonymous writer is Michael Allen Dymmoch, which is said to be the name of a woman who works as a professional driver somewhere around Chicago. Her The Man Who Understood Cats (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 244 pp.) has won a prize as the best first traditional mystery, and rightly so.

It is an ingeniously plotted, swift-advancing yet sensitively-observed story centering on the murder of a young accountant. John Thinnes, a Chicago detective, gets the case, and high on the list of interviewees is Jack Caleb, a psychiatrist who had been treating the victim. Caleb is a cat-owner, who understands felines as well as he does humans, and the particular and unusual tension of the book is that he has a kind of dual role as both co-protagonist and likely suspect.

Dymmoch (shown on the jacket in unisex fedora and trench coat) builds a continuously surprising series of turns, including attempted murders that sometimes succeed, all leading to a denouement that is a true surprise. Caleb is gay, and Dymmoch handles with taste and care that aspect of the uneasy confrontations between Caleb and the straight detective. A fine debut.

Sue Grafton’s ever more popular alphabet series starring Kinsey Millhone is 10/26ths along and shows no sign of flagging. J Is for Judgment (Holt: $21.95; 288 pp.) appeared on the bestseller list even before its official publication date.

J is also for Jaffe--Wendell Jaffe, a fast-track businessman in the Santa Barbara-like Santa Teresa--missing long enough to have been presumed dead, so that Kinsey’s old insurance company (from which she’d been fired a couple of letters ago) had to pay off on a half-million dollar policy. Now Jaffe’s been spotted in a Mexican village and Kinsey, temporarily rehired, is assigned to go down and unobtrusively check it out.

She does and it was and is Jaffe, and a pursuit begins, as she tries to cherchez l’homme and his new lady, and subsequently meets those who are not happy that Jaffe should be among the living again. The action is, as always, abundant; Kinsey is, as always, finally in deep jeopardy. But the loose ends don’t tie up quite so tidily this time, and there are dark speculations about degrees of guilt and innocence and the costs of love.

Formulas need to be renewed not just repeated, and Grafton is clearly at pains to keep stretching the parameters of Kinsey and her challenges, as she does here.

How can we ignore Stuart Woods’ L.A. Times (HarperCollins: $21; 328 pp.), which actually has nothing to do with this or any other paper? A movie-mad young crime family hanger-on who collects vigorish for loan sharks produces a low-budget film and, by a not unbelievable combination of chutzpah, muscle and betrayals, parlays it into a studio deal in Hollywood, with a new name and unchanged rattlesnake morals.

The book reads like “The Player” retold by Mario Puzo with footnotes by Budd Schulberg of “What Makes Sammy Run,” which is to say it’s a slick, fast, often caustically funny tale, with a tingling uncertainty as to whether Vinnie’s rotten past and still more rotten present will catch up with him, even though he’s now the boss of a whole studio.

Track of the Cat (Putnam: $19.95; 228 pp.) is a second novel and first mystery by Nevada Barr, a ranger in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. Her setting is a small park in the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas, her heroine a ranger named Anna Pigeon.

Another female ranger has been killed, apparently by a mountain lion, although Pigeon can’t believe it. The ranger station seems to teem with suspects, and there are more equally suspicious deaths, along with a near-successful attempt on Pigeon’s own life.

Although the author is occasionally reduced to having Pigeon talk to her horse to keep the deduction moving (the value of Dr. Watson to Holmes was never clearer), she ultimately tells an eventful, characterful story with a slam-bang denouement, all set in a wilderness environment she knows, loves and describes with poetic passion.

Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse of Oxford is now a television hero, which ought to keep no one from going to the source: Dexter’s wonderfully written, idiosyncratic novels, of which the latest is The Way Through the Woods (Crown: $20; 296 pp.).

A hitchhiking Swedish woman has been missing near Blenheim Palace for a year and is presumably dead, probably murdered. A curious poem in a newspaper seems to offer hidden clues to the whereabouts of the corpse . Morse, whose beverage intake stops short if not well short of alcoholism and whose love of Mozart is immense, contributes his own poems anonymously to further the hunt. (The correspondence is a delightful parody of the letters column in the Times of London.)

Dexter is a dazzling plotter and Morse’s way, replete with detours and cul-de-sacs, to the true events of her disappearance is a ceaseless excitement, made the livelier by his gift for flashes of logical intuition. What is also true is that in Morse, Dexter has created a detective who derives from no other fictional model (I suppose he could be an illegitimate grandson of Holmes) and has a personality (both truculent and vulnerable) that is as individual as a fingerprint. He is unparalleled good company.

Goodnight, Irene (Simon & Schuster: $18; 256 pp.) by Jan Burke appears to be a first novel, certainly the first in a new mystery series featuring Irene Kelly, a newspaper reporter in fictional Las Piernas, a small city somewhere in Southern California. Burke is off to a very promising start.

Kelly is a newspaper reporter whose curmudgeonly mentor, named O’Connor, is blown to bits by a car bomb. The killing may have been related to his annual story on (and continuing pursuit of) a three-decade unsolved murder of a pregnant woman.

Assigned to the story, Kelly begins trying to decipher cryptic notes O’Connor left in his computer. She is nearly dispatched in a drive-by shooting, which brings a local detective to her side, his demands that she leave the detecting to him naturally being ignored.

Trails always lead somewhere and this one leads to present-day political corruption with a long history, and Burke creates a tense and explosive finale.

Britain’s funniest crime writer, Simon Brett, reintroduces Melita Pargeter, widow of a master criminal, in Mrs. Pargeter’s Pound of Flesh (Scribner’s: $20; 207 pp.), a fast, funny fable set at a fat farm. Mrs. Pargeter is there to lend support to a thinning friend, with no intent of dieting herself, especially since the proprietors are old mates of the late Mr. P. and eager to accommodate her caloric needs.

Murder is afoot to conceal other foul deeds and Mrs. P., with help from her dubious pals, sets it all straight. A book invented for hammocks and plane rides.

Julie Smith’s “New Orleans Mourning” won an Edgar a year or so ago. Her new novel, Jazz Funeral (Fawcett: $18; 365 pp.), is again set in a New Orleans the author evokes to its last sultry aroma. Her heroine is Margaret (Skip) Langdon of the local police. She moves at ease in society, although her family wishes she had elected a more socially acceptable trade.

The producer of a big local jazz festival is blown away hours before a big party to launch the fun. His kid sister disappears and is not so much a suspect as a worrying question. She hides out as a street musician, and Smith catches the look and feel of the life with documentary feeling. The dead man’s family is clearly a mess, as Smith makes sadly, dramatically clear in a first-rate book.