CRIMINAL PURSUITS

It seems clearer every year that Ruth Rendell is the best writer of crime fiction now working in English on either side of the Atlantic.

What is remarkable--no; what is astonishing--about her writing is not simply that she is so prolific but that her work is so unfailingly original from one book to the next, so carefully written and so mesmerizingly interesting in its plotting and revelation of character.

Each time out she appears to set herself a fresh and testing challenge: to take the reader inside an ever more elusive psychological state, to find a new way of presenting her story, to avoid repeating herself ever and to work toward resolutions that always surprise but never seem arbitrary or unconvincing.

This month she presents us with a doubleheader. As Ruth Rendell, she has written THE CROCODILE BIRD (Crown: $20; 361 pp.). As Barbara Vine, a nom de plume that has never been a secret, she presents ANNA’S BOOK (Harmony: $22; 394 pp.).

In each book (as a kind of self-challenge redoubled) Rendell examines a woman. Both are mothers whose stories are gradually and tantalizingly revealed, like images emerging in a developing tray or figures taking form and dimension as night becomes dawn. Each novel is a sparkling display of an author at the peak of her powers.

In nature, crocodile birds have a symbiotic relationship with the great aquatic reptile, able to strut about unharmed into its mouth, to pick its teeth and even to fly by warning it of impending dangers. In fiction, the bird is Liza, the teen-age daughter of an unusual woman named Eve. They live in the gatehouse on an English estate for which the mother has an obsessive love.

The two live as totally sealed-off from the outside world as can be managed late in the late years of the 20th Century. No newspapers, TV, radio, telephone, no school; mother is teacher and a very rigorous one, offering Latin, Greek and Shakespeare but no math or science. When mother necessarily goes to town to shop, the child Liza is locked in her room.

At the outset of the novel, men in blue arrive to take mother away, but not before she has given the concealed Liza some money and orders to flee forever when the coast is clear. Liza, now 16, runs not to mother’s friend in London but to her own boyfriend. As they do their fleeing together, Liza spins out her story of life with mother (like Scheherazade, she tells the boy, although it’s no one he knows).

It is, of course, quite a story: of rape, abandonment, love, promises made but unkept, hopes denied but persisting to a bitter end, and all along the way the horrific efforts needed to preserve the gatehouse as sanctuary.

More evident than ever is Rendell’s ability to evoke, with poetic exactness, the life and look of the English countryside in all weathers, but most gloriously in spring. She is as ever very good at evoking the brutish lives of the poor and the cruel indifferences of the rich, and she distributes just desserts to both.

“Anna’s Book” is a different kind of tour de force, but a grand tour all the same. Anna, a Danish immigrant to turn-of-the-century England, has become a posthumous bestseller when the dozens of diaries she kept are found and published and made into a miniseries.

The mystery, which is explored in present time by Anna’s granddaughter and heiress, is whether one of Anna’s daughters, the narrator’s aunt, was really hers or a secret and perhaps illicit adoption, as a recent hateful and anonymous letter has claimed. And indeed, what was on those pages torn from one of Anna’s diaries?

There are excerpts--in Danish--heading some of the chapters and long sections of the diaries as translated, in themselves an impressive act of the imagination. They add to the engrossing, evolving portrait of Anna--her feelings of isolation in an alien land, the submergence of her true self, her caustic comments on her neighbors, the society, her pompous husband (a pioneering auto dealer who ends up broke) and their lumpish maid-servant.

The mystery is sustained to very nearly the end, as in all good crime fiction, yet the mystery this time is less gripping than the progressive picture of Anna, seen last as a proud, imperious, idiosyncratic old woman who has kept secret the central and unsuspected drama of her life. Anna is at last not quite lovable, but she is comprehensible and mesmerizing. And the book becomes as well a glimpse, vivid as memory itself, of a slice of London life over much of this century. It is Rendell as before, meeting her challenges with a flourish.

The best proof of the power of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation is that the latter-day extensions of Sherlock Holmes work so well so often, unlike the copies of James Bond and Nero Wolfe, for example.

One of the most original and affecting is Sena Jeter Naslund’s SHERLOCK IN LOVE (David R. Godine: $21.95, 229 pp.). “To begin with, Holmes was dead,” Naslund’s story commences briskly. Dr. Watson survives and has recently advertised his intention to write a Holmes biography; reminiscences solicited, etc.

Instead, an anonymous letter warns him off the project. More alarming, perhaps, he begins to imagine he sees Holmes eluding in the fog and hears his footstep on the Baker Street stairs. He finds a note long hidden in the violin case, signed by a V. Sigerson. But the pages where the name would have appeared in Holmes’ day book have been torn out. Well!

Naslund, who teaches at the University of Louisville, has constructed an intricate plot in flashback form, economically set forth and unusually poignant. The proceedings lead to a Holmes adventure in Europe and a meeting with a fine violinist who proves to be a woman masquerading as a man. (This is probably the first feminist view of Holmes, and the masquerade reminds us that in Victorian times women did not play in symphonies.)

Rupert Croft-Cooke, who died in 1979 at the age of 76, wrote and published 126 books, including 27 volumes of autobiography. These did not include a collection of the short mystery stories he published in the London Evening Standard in the 50s under the name Leo Bruce.

The stories have now been discovered and collected as MURDER IN MINIATURE by Leo Bruce, compiled and edited by B. A. Pike (Academy Chicago: $20, 241 pp., illustrated by Barbara Spann). Most feature a bulky police sergeant named Beef remembering his best cases, which he tended to solve with insightful common sense.

There was the matter of the sugar in the morning tea, the dwarf corpse in the luggage rack, the fatal shouted warning and so on. The stories are imaginative, folksy and charming, to be taken one a night at bedtime. The Evening Standard readers got more than their sixpence worth.

Meg O’Brien, who often writes mysteries featuring reporter Jessica James, has now done a second suspense novel, THIN ICE (Doubleday: $17, 343 pp.). Nicole Ryan’s sister, Mary, a pharmaceutical researcher, drowns when her car plunges into the Potomac. It is an unlikely accident.

Nicole is overwrought and stressed out to begin with, living in a half-world where mythology (she is a doctoral student) blurs into reality. Now she finds that Mary had discovered a new immunology drug worth a fortune and that the unscrupulous would kill (and have) to get their hands on the formula.

Death stalks Nicole herself, who has the formula, and a dark of night finale high on a rusting waterfront crane is a fine stretch of narrative prose. The sibling relationship remembered, and folklorish truths, as that the same person can look like two different people when seen by different eyes, gives O’Brien’s book a more than routine resonance.

Douglas Skeggs is a painter who directs an art school in London and writes mysteries about the world of art. In THE TRIUMPH OF BACCHUS (St. Martin’s: $19.95, 253 pp.), Titian’s painting of the same name has been stolen from the National Gallery.

A former Christie’s art expert and painter named Tom Shaughnessy is having a copy made, with the help of a master forger named Scobie, and the key excitement of the book is the lore of the copying--finding an old canvas to be reworked, grinding paints that will fool the authenticating experts.

A zealous television anchorwoman gets into the act--the theft is the latest in a succession of art heists and ransomings. Skegg’s story is complicated and intriguing, nothing quite matching appearances, and the payoff, at night on a snowy Alp, is a thrill preceding some startling but tidy revelations. A fresh and pleasing work all the way round.

The murder of Christopher Marlowe in a Deptford guest house in 1593, allegedly over a disputed bill for the meal, has interested scholars for centuries. The official autopsy report, signed by Elizabeth I herself, was found in the national archives as recently as 1925.

It remains a mystery. Marlowe, who spied for England in Europe (snooping out plots against the Protestant queen) was also an atheist and the lover of the spymaster’s son, Thomas Walsingham. Recently arrested, he was free while awaiting trial when he was killed.

Judith Cook’s THE SLICING EDGE OF DEATH (St. Martin’s: $18.95, 234 pp.) dramatizes the time and the fateful Deptford day. Ingram Frizer, arrested for the murder, was pardoned by the queen and later given a grant of land.

The whole business remains suspicious. Was Marlowe executed with the queen’s acquiescence? It could have been. Marlowe was stabbed from behind, the knife entering the right eye--a difficult thrust for the killer. The other diners evidently made no move to interfere. The official line remains improbable, 400 years later.

Cook retells the tale in strained prose with minor and unhelpful inventions and leaves us none the wiser. A book by the late Calvin Hoffman argued that the death was faked, the corpse a luckless vagrant’s perhaps, and Marlowe fled to Italy to continue writing Shakespeare’s plays. Cook ignores that version. Too bad; it’s a better mystery.