CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Jack O’Connell’s WIRELESS (Mysterious Press: $19.95; 402 pp.) is set in the fictional New England city of Quinsigamond (it could be Lowell or any of several others), which the passing of the Industrial Revolution has left a rusting, decaying relic. Ethnic gangs--Irish, Asian, Latino--control pieces of turf and vie violently for citywide dominance.

The prevailing counterculture sport is jamming the local radio stations with messages that seem cumulatively to advance chaos as being preferable to stagnation. The most frequently jammed target is a talk-show host who makes Limbaugh seem a flaming liberal.

You wonder if O’Connell is an admirer of Don DeLillo (“The Names,” “Running Dog”); they share an ability to concoct a mad world largely by widening the fault lines in the real world.

A priest trying to reconcile Quinsigamond’s warring factions is torched in his confessional. No secret, his killer is Speer, a former FBI agent, cashiered for unnecessary roughness but still worshiping J. Edgar and carrying on as a purifier of all he finds impure in the world, which is practically everything.

The story is not really a search for Speer. He resurfaces from time to time like acrid punctuation, but it is the other manic goings-on that interest O’Connell and the reader, although there is an inexorable rush toward Speer’s final conjunction with destiny.

O’Connell’s large, baroque cast includes a woman detective who works as independently as a private eye, a husband-and-wife team of dwarfs who are prize-winning ballroom dancers and secret jammers, a late-night talk-show hostess specializing in explicit counsel to the sexually dysfunctional, an insurance agent who is also a kind of ombudsman to the night people, gang chieftains of varying virulence; and, as they say, much, much more.

The novel has a kind of hallucinatory fascination, a phantasmagoric quality that is not without precedent (see also Jerome Charyn’s Isaac Sidel stories, for example) but that is amazing in its density, power, richness of detail, humor and irony. O’Connell’s evocations of the anarchic city, which he introduced in his first novel, “Box Nine,” are especially fine, and not a little disturbing. A dazzling piece of work.

THE POISON POOL (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 250 pp.) is a notably competent first novel by Patricia Hall, an English journalist living in Oxford. An old man is bashed to death on a housing estate and a retarded teen-ager arrested for the crime. He dies in jail, an apparent suicide. But a social worker and a detective (who has had the case taken away from him by his chief) are by no means sure.

What becomes evident in Hall’s fast and atmospheric story is that a large-scale cover-up is in process, the work of a shadowy consortium of local bigwigs with clout enough to frame the detective with a phony bank account.

It is a classic plot--innocents imperiled by sinister forces they can’t identify or, presumably, prevail against. The social worker narrowly avoids death and all events lead to an extraordinary, extended confrontation at an abandoned mine shaft, which has become an illicit toxic waste dump. Aha!

Hall’s crisp story is all the more effective for her ear for Yorkshire speech and her feeling for village life, in particular the tensions between the police and the council house dwellers.

Archer Mayor’s fourth novel about Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vt., police, THE SKELETON’S KNEE (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 311 pp.) is an uncommonly intricate and engrossing police procedural.

A man living as a well-heeled loner on a remote farm dies of delayed poisonings from an ancient bullet wound. A dig in his garden reveals a skeleton with a bullet-grazed artificial knee. A mysterious chart disappears from the dead man’s wall while his death is still under investigation, and shots are fired at the ambulance carting the skeleton away. It’s a puzzlement; is it ever.

Gunther traces the prosthesis to Chicago, where it becomes even more apparent that a person or persons unknown still seek revenge for something that happened years before. On the loose in Chicago, Gunther gets into so much trouble that his first-person narrative suggests a private eye novel as much as a procedural.

The explanations are splendidly knotty, and punctuated with more bullets and a stalk-out amid puppets. Mayor has Gunther well in hand by now, and the series is superior of its kind.

LITERARY MURDER by Batya Gur (HarperCollins: $20; 359 pp., translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu) is her second novel to be published here. Like the first, “The Saturday Morning Murder,” it features Michael Ohayon, the Morocco-born chief inspector of the Jerusalem police.

A star poet-professor at Hebrew University with a history of lechery is beaten to death in his office. Days before, a young disciple of his in the department had drowned while scuba-diving and his death, too, proves to have been murder.

As in the novels of P. D. James and Elizabeth George, setting and atmosphere are everything, although the clean but undemonstrative translation by Dalya Bilu lacks the flights of eloquence found in the other women’s prose. But, slow and discursive as the novel is, it also has a solidity and an earnestness that rewards the patient reader.

Ohayon is a credible figure, world-weary and pessimistic. “At the beginning of every case he would be filled with the terrible certainty that this time there would be no solution. And then came this weariness, accompanied by voices that reminded him of the futility of life, the futility of death, the fact that in the end someone would be punished and that this would solve nothing.” It seems possible that every detective feels something like this from time to time.

At another point, the fatalistic Ohayon notes, “It was still hot and the streets were full of people who were looking neither for corpses nor for murderers.”

The novel is interesting not least for the faculty’s hothouse hassling over matters of creativity and judgment. What makes a poem good, or not good? The dead professor was as famous for his slashing dismissals of new work as for his seductions. Gur appears intimately familiar with academic infighting.

Her plot hints early on that a nasty kind of plagiarism has propelled the dire deeds, but there are surprises reserved for the denouement nevertheless.

What the book demonstrates is that excellent crime fiction is being written in many languages. The relatively few books that receive translation into English are tantalizing hints of the many that don’t.

Joe Gores’ “32 Cadillacs” was one of the hilarious pleasures of 1992. His new one, DEAD MAN (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 260 pp.) is far from hilarious, but a barn-burner of a thriller.

Eddie Dain, a computer detective who raises questions about a death, is blown to pieces by two gunmen who also destroy wife and son. After two years on the mend Dain emerges with an implacable drive to identify the man who ordered the hit and the two men who actually killed his family.

The clues are few and thin, but Gores creates a persuasive chain that leads Dain to an ultimate showdown on a Louisiana bayou as he and a woman, neither armed, lay in wait for four men who knew where they are and who are coming to kill them. The book is a triumph of suspense--commercial crime fiction at its smoothest by a veteran in the field.

Jerome Doolittle’s protagonist, Tom Bethany, is an investigator who is also a volunteer coach for the Harvard wrestling team. His four outings have had holds for titles, starting with “Body Scissors” and now offering HEAD LOCK (Pocket Books: $20; 245 pp.).

Tom’s love, Hope, is a married woman who runs the Washington office of the ACLU. Midway into her marriage, her husband came out of the closet, but they stay civilly together, accepting each other’s preferences.

Now she is pregnant by Tom, and reluctantly goes for a legal abortion, arriving at the clinic amid a violent pro-choice demonstration organized by a far-right television preacher with political ambitions.

A terrified teen-ager, denied an abortion because of her emotional state and harassed by the demonstrators, later commits suicide. Her death propels Bethany into a one-man campaign against the preacher.

Bethany’s approach, getting the preacher seduced into showing his own naughty proclivities as well as his unscrupulous ambition, is predictably satisfying and the ultimate rewards of what amounts to everlasting coercion of the preacher are amusing at a satirical level.

Yet after Tom’s and Hope’s sobering considerations for and against the abortion (Tom is against it) and after the gritty, headline realism of the demonstration at the clinic and the teen-ager’s suicide, Bethany’s slick assault on the preacher, hypocritical and demagogic as he is painted, seems inadequate to the seriousness of the issue. The real anger that served Doolittle so well in last year’s “Bear Hug” (about the S&L; scandals) has here not been so much muted as perfectly disguised.