CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Michael Connelly’s third novel, THE CONCRETE BLONDE (Little, Brown: $21.95; 392 pp.) achieves a kind of crime fiction hat trick. Like his award-winning debut, “The Black Ice,” and last year’s “The Black Echo,” the new one is a police procedural of crackling authenticity. But it is also a courtroom drama worthy of any of those from the current crop of lawyer-novelists. And finally it is a cunningly conceived mystery in which, in the Agatha Christie tradition, a series of quite convincing suspects are set up and cast aside before the ultimate perpetrator is revealed. (And a surprising but acceptable jolt it is.)

Harry (short for Hieronymous) Bosch, Connelly’s LAPD homicide detective, is on trial--a civil case--for killing a suspected serial killer during an investigation four years earlier. The nude and unarmed man was, as it turned out, reaching under a pillow for a toupee instead of a weapon. The widow is suing.

Bosch remains confident he got the right man, but a subsequent killing with the same characteristics is a gift to the tough prosecuting attorney, a woman, suggesting Bosch shot the wrong man in another instance of police arrogance and brutality. (Rodney King hovers over the trial.)

Connelly, who left daily journalism at The Times to concentrate on his novels, has created in Bosch a good, stubborn, perceptive, independent-minded cop who is neither a super-hero nor a burned-out case (although his life could stand improvement).

When Bosch can get away from the courtroom, he explores the new case (a woman encased in concrete), following a tenuous track into the sad and gamy half-world in the San Fernando Valley where porno filming and prostitution meet. Among its several virtues, the novel is vigorous, tautly suspenseful and finally confrontational.

Once in a rare while, Connelly strains for a Chandleresque touch (an empty house has windows “as empty as a dead man’s eyes”). Far more often, his prose has the elegant accuracy and sensitivity of superior reportage.

He writes with anger as well: “Through political ineptitude and opportunism, the city had allowed (the LAPD) to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization . . . top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served.”

Connelly joins the top rank of a new generation of crime writers.

Marcia Muller launched the present wave of women writing about women as sleuths with Sharon McCone in “Edwin of the Iron Shoes” in 1977. Still less celebrated than Sue Grafton or Sara Paretsky, Muller quietly keeps getting better and better.

In McCone’s 15th outing, TILL THE BUTCHERS CUT HIM DOWN (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 339 pp.) Muller has split from the San Francisco legal cooperative where she was the investigator to open her own firm.

Her first client is a hustler she knew on campus in the ‘60s, when he peddled exam questions, ghosted essays and controlled substances out of a battered suitcase. He became Suitcase Gordon, in fact. Now he’s a so-called turnaround man, grown rich by moving in to rescue failing corporations by ruthless firings and closures, making platoons of enemies in the process.

He says one of the enemies is out to kill him. True enough. His Mendocino coast home is blown sky-high, with a victim inside. McCone, herself in jeopardy early on, explores Gordon’s past in a Nevada ghost town he saved, a Pennsylvania steel mill he didn’t, a San Francisco dockyard still in the works.

Muller has not previously created so wide and varied a canvas, nor so extensive a cast of characters. At 39, McCone is newly thoughtful about her life--a mix of boredom, danger and loneliness. Her love is a man often absent on mysterious errands, though you feel that in revealing a little more of him in each book, Muller is efficiently setting up stories yet to come. She is ready for much larger audiences.

The Victorian novel was thought skimpy if, after serialization, it did not fill three hard-cover volumes. In modern one-volume editions, Anthony Trollope runs well beyond 800 pages without getting winded. Elizabeth George, enamored of all things British from her Orange County perch, appears to have a comparable Victorian itch.

Her seventh novel, PLAYING FOR THE ASHES (Bantam: $21.95; 624 pp.) is of near-Trollopian dimensions, outdistancing “A Taste for Death” by P. D. James (another neo-Victorian in her spaciousness) by some 200 pages.

A torched cottage in Kent proves to contain the charred remains of a leading cricketer, Kenneth Fleming, a Mickey Mantle of the greensward and the white flannels. (The ashes of the title are the symbolic trophy of the England-Australia test matches.)

The novel alternates between chapters of a report being written by a woman named Olivia, who is dying of Lou Gehrig disease, and other chapters told in the standard third-person omniscient. The investigators are the lordly Thomas Lynley, as before, and his working class aide, Det. Sgt. Barbara Havers. It reveals the leisurely expansiveness of the George style that she requires nine pages simply to establish Havers’ new residence, even before Lynley calls to say there’s work to be done. And much later, as we await, doggedly, for the denouement, we must pause while Lynley and his lady go for a long jog in the park.

The result seems to be a kind of mystification--obfuscation, really--by style, and I was reminded of an aside the comedian Bobby Clark tossed at the audience during his revival of “Sweethearts:” “Never was a thin plot so complicated.”

Fleming proves to have been quite a player, with an estranged wife and at least two mistresses. The difficulty for the reader (one, anyway) is that neither Fleming in retrospect, nor the women, nor the other menfolk who rise and fall as suspects, are very interesting.

To cite another memory evoked by the book: The late Lord Boothby once remarked that the British, never having been a particularly religious people, had invented cricket to provide themselves some conception of eternity. Just so.

Nicolas Freeling, the English-born novelist now living in Strasbourg, takes quite a different tack. His YOU WHO KNOW (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 192 pp.) is hardly longer than a novella, but as always it is such an allusive, elusive, elliptical, richly internalized trip with his Inspector Henri Castang that it is as richly satisfying as a full meal.

Castang, now doing bureaucratic work at the European Community in Brussels, is puzzled by the murder of a likable Irishman who also worked at the Community. With no valid police credentials, Castang noses around in Ireland, then in the Italian Alps, where a woman on the same pursuit is gunned down almost at his side. The Irishman was, not least, a lover; what else he was and was not Castang seeks to discover.

There is, of all things, a master criminal, oddly named Subercaseaux, lurking about, subtler but not much less lethal than those 007 met, and his confrontation with Castang, on a boat in an Alpine lake is a showdown conducted, as you might say, in killing words.

Freeling writes like no one else. There is an astonishing amount of action and suspense in the novel, given its brevity. Yet its charm is in its musings, its adroit wit, its acknowledgment of values, including love, friendship, honor, loyalty and, to be sure, justice.

Castang’s Czech wife Vera is herself a fully realized character, a free-speaking delight whose perceptions can be unexpectedly helpful to her husband. They both notice “how the most complicated things in life become simple. Like dying.” And Castang, the most civilized of policemen, can acknowledge the blunt instrument of police reasoning and add sardonically, “Never mind all this rubbish of music and poetry.” Wonderful.

A new voice of unexpected origin arrives this month. John Armistead is said to be a Baptist preacher in Tupelo, Miss. In A LEGACY OF VENGEANCE (Carroll & Graf: $21; 256 pp.), Armistead writes of a series of killings of black men--the first a preacher--whose motivation appears to lie in the tumultuous civil rights struggles of the Mississippi 1960s.

I don’t remember a sleuth who is forever chewing Red Man tobacco, but in this aspect of Sheriff Grover Bramlett as in all his observances of the state’s rural hill country, Armistead is right on target.

A mysterious white Pontiac, untraceable, seems to be the carrier of death. Bramlett himself, who infiltrated the Klan as an FBI spy in the ‘60s, begins to suspect his cover has been blown and that he himself is on the hit list of whatever white supremacists are seeking the long-delayed vengeance. Indeed, the sheriff and his wife are in peril, but Armistead has some clever and plausible plot twists in hand, and nothing is quite as it appears.

The prose is occasionally stiff, especially when Armistead is conveying thought processes, but he tells a strong story and has made a strong debut.

Ian Rankin is a Scots writer, living in Edinburgh, London and France. He writes about an Edinburgh detective named John Rebus. In HIDE AND SEEK: A John Rebus Mystery (Otto Penzler Books: $21; 210 pp.), Rebus confronts the murder (by rat poison-enriched heroin) of a young addict who had been living as a squatter in an abandoned housing project. Dying, the addict has told a girlfriend “They’ve murdered me.” The who and the why are unusually baffling.

In Rankin’s swift procedural, Rebus, a rough-cut diamond who would be a hard man to work for as his underlings discover, arrives at last at a posh gambling club with special and perverse activities in the basement that attract Edinburgh’s major power figures.

The procedural becomes a large, slam bang caper whose ending is and is not satisfying, with its breathtakingly cynical view of the recuperative abilities of a power structure.

Eleanor Taylor Bland is one of the small but slowly growing number of black writers of crime fiction, and one of the very few women. Her Marti MacAlister is a police detective, who is black, in a small Illinois city closely resembling Waukegan, where Taylor lives. Marti is a widowed mother, formerly on the Chicago force.

In GONE QUIET (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 224 pp.), an unpleasant old man, a tyrannical father and husband, has been found dead in bed, suffocated despite the appearances of heart failure. Almost anyone who knew him is a suspect, including his long-suffering wife. Bland’s book is as much a study of a dysfunctional black family as a police investigation, but on both accounts it is closely observed, carefully written and admirable, Marti a sympathetic witness to black life in the community.

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