CRIMINAL PURSUITS

T. Haymon (the S is for Sylvia) is an excellent English novelist still too little known by American readers. But she lifts crime writing to the level of literature, never more eloquently than in BEAUTIFUL DEATH (St. Martin’s: $19.95, 222 pp.) , the seventh in a series featuring Ben Jurnet, a police inspector in the east of England.

Miriam, the woman Jurnet has pursued and loved through earlier books, is killed by a car bomb at his front door. Throughout much of the book Jurnet is distraught with grief, wondering about “the continuing irrelevance of drawing breath,” in one of Haymon’s uncommonly fine turns of phrase.

Later, crying himself to sleep, “Jurnet briefly gave himself up to a hatred of all gods, Christian, Jewish, Moslem, the lot.” But the policeman side of him takes over and a near-murderous wish for revenge sets him on a trail that leads to Ireland and more explosives and considerable peril for Jurnet and a handicapped young Israeli woman who worked with Miriam. (More of her in subsequent volumes, one suspects.)

Haymon gets inside Jurney’s soul and handles his introspection wonderfully well, but she is also an expert yarn-spinner and the action gains speed like a plane lifting off. The villain’s confession is psychologically interesting, although it is very long, a tidying of threads--always a peril when all manner of puzzlements have to be answered at once. No matter: it is a superior novel.

Another supremely expert yarn-spinner is Miami’s Edna Buchanan. Many a woman on city-side must envy Buchanan’s genius at translating her life as a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter into best-selling fiction. MIAMI, IT’S MURDER (Hyperion: $21.95, 244 pp.) carries forward the adventures of Britt Montero, a Cuban-American reporter on a Miami daily.

A candidate for governor was an undisclosed suspect in a very old unsolved child murder. An old cop who specialized in unsolved crimes, and was a crime beat mentor to Montero, has been put out to pasture. A serial killer whose MO is flavored with Santeria, the voodoo-like reinterpretation of Catholicism, is on the loose and dubbed the Downtown Rapist, imperiling Montero in a taut sequence.

And, as in the work of such other Miami novelists as John Katzenbach, Carl Hiaasen and Paul Levine, the city itself--in all its steamy and violent contradictions of wealth, race and nationality--is itself a character. No one, I think, evokes it better than Buchanan. And no one catches any better the atmosphere of a metropolitan newspaper’s city room, with all its steamy contradictions (including a nasty, competitive woman boss).

Her book is notably active, suspenseful, rife with the unexpected, and above all rich in texture.

It is a fine month for the yarn-spinners, in fact. Sam Llewellyn is another of them, his novels frequently involving the sea and sailing. CLAWHAMMER (Pocket Books: $20, 373 pp.) is more land-centered than most, but also one of his best.

His protagonist, George Devis, explorer, sailor, ornithologist (“Best Guide to British Birds”) is in Ethiopia visiting his sister and her country-singing husband, who’ve abandoned the bright lights to help a Third World village.

Sister and husband are murdered, apparently by a local warlord, but the reverberations follow Devis to England and then the United States. The curiosities include an urn of radioactive flour and a tape-recording giving the details of a plot the singer was investigating. An international press tycoon and several members of a severe sect called Christ’s Brethren further enliven the recipe.

Devis does take refuge on a boat off the New England coast, but finds as always that there are no safe harbors anywhere. Llewellyn invents and describes action very well indeed.

Yet another lawyer has joined the ranks of novelists. Michael C. Eberhardt, a criminal defense attorney who lives in Lancaster, Calif., has written BODY OF A CRIME (Dutton: $19.95, 364 pp.) inspired by a murder trial in which no body had been found. (The defendant Eberhardt represented was acquitted.)

Eberhardt has concocted an elaborate no-body scenario--a heiress missing and presumed dead, a professional athlete indicted. She’s found alive and in hiding, but then murdered, the athlete remaining the prime suspect. The defense attorney, Sean Barrett, sets out to find the truth and does, not without strenuous difficulties. The courtroom finale is worthy of Perry Mason, with a twist that Mason might or might not have approved. It’s a lively first effort.

Yet another California lawyer breaking into print is Blair Hoffman. He is a former deputy attorney general now a staff attorney for the state Supreme Court in San Francisco. The setting for MURDER FOR THE PROSECUTION (Carroll & Graf: $18.95, 220 pp.) is the attorney general’s office (write about what you know; always good advice), where one of the deputies, set to argue a death penalty case, is gunned down in her office by a tagged weapon from the evidence locker, thus suggesting it was an inside job.

More deaths follow and the office appears to be a wormy nest of jealousies and concealments. Hoffman’s prose is on the stiff side, and his characters tend to sound alike, but these are start-up problems and his confident command of the scene and his plotting suggest that he has promise.

Arthur Lyon’s FALSE PRETENSES (Mysterious Press: $18.95, 233 pp.) is like an amalgam of all the Southern California private eye stories that ever were. His Jacob Asch is your not very successful investigator, always a sucker for justice, a blonde/redhead/brunette with a lament, or any gent with a retainer in hand.

He trots off on a wild goose chase with the latter and returns to find a fresh corpse in his office, followed all too soon by two nasty detectives in the Raymond Chandler-Ross MacDonald tradition.

Karen Kijewski, sometime English teacher and bartender, won a best first private-eye novel competition with “Katwalk” in 1989. It featured a woman investigator named Kat Colorado, who returns for the fifth time in WILD KAT (Doubleday: $19.95, 309 pp.).

Chapters are prefaced by amusing questions and answers from a lovelorn column written by a pal of Kat’s, and vaguely related to the story, a nice touch. Kat herself is one of the toughest and toughest-talking of the new breed of female investigators.

Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski is as tough-minded and just as resilient in a physical crisis, but retains a roundness and a depth of feeling that Kat seems to be losing.

The new Colorado is one of Kijewski’s most elaborate. A woman about to blow the whistle on a manufacturer of defective heart valves is murdered, setting off a lethal chain of events and an all-points pursuit of Kat by agents (mostly dimwitted) of the bad person or persons.

There is plenty of violence and the culprits are successively revealed as in a set of nesting Russian dolls. But the suspicion arises that Kijewski might profit from a new protagonist. Kat’s snarling tongue has grown to be not so much unattractive as unpersuasive. A kind of creative weariness overhangs the book, despite some good minor characterizations and moments when compassion threatens to break out.