CRIMINAL PURSUITS

Sharyn McCrumb, whose grandfathers were circuit-riding preachers in Appalachia, has now written three books in what she calls her Ballad series, set in the hills and hollows of east Tennessee and infusing the present with the spirit of its people’s long, hard, tradition of survival. “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” was splendid. SHE WALKS THESE HILLS (Scribner’s: $21, 336 pp.) is I think even better.

In a triumph of plot construction, several lines converge in a remarkably dramatic final confrontation. An old man doing life for murder and suffering from a syndrome that leaves him no memory of recent events (an hour ago, a day ago) escapes and becomes the object of a manhunt. A small town disc jockey takes up the old man’s cause as an on-the-air lark. A dispatcher in the sheriff’s office becomes a temporary deputy and sets out to find him single-handedly to advance her career. A college teacher who could get lost on a playground decides to retrace the trail of an 18th-Century woman who was carried off by the Shawnees, escaped and walked hundreds of miles back to her home, only to die young. She is the “She” of the title, and there are those who still believe they glimpse her ghostly figure among the trees.

An elderly woman, a kind of Scotch-Irish Greek chorus, has the Sight. When “the air was crisp and the light was right and the birds were still,” she can see what was, even if it has been veiled by history, and can foresee what will be, even though she can’t deflect the course of events.

The empirically minded reader is free to reject the mystical goings-on, but McCrumb’s calmly eloquent prose leaves no doubt that these matters of the spirit are as real among the hollows as stills and brambles.

It is a richly detailed novel. There is, not least, a good deal of fascinating geology--a trail of rocks that links Appalachia with Europe, the consequence of prehistoric tectonic shiftings. The chapter headings are verses from an 1885 Tennessee Methodist hymnal, and they are movingly apt underscorings for a story in which the persistence of the past is so strong an element.

McCrumb, who can be very funny, and has been in earlier books (“Bimbos of the Death Sun” won an Edgar as best original paperback in 1988), is not all quaintness here. The new deputy’s troubles with her philandering boyfriend, also a deputy, are acutely observed and earthily amusing. The plight of the lost academic is painfully real. And McCrumb does an affecting job of conveying the dazed mental states of the escapee, who is mostly a danger to himself.

There are, of course, mysteries present and past. Why did Katie Wyler, the walker of the title, die so suddenly on her return, and who murdered the escapee’s ex-wife so brutally?

As happens with few books any time, the reader can’t wait to see how it all comes out, but is at the same reluctant for the book to end.

James Sallis, the New Orleans translator-essayist-reviewer, has now completed his own trilogy of mystery-thrillers, begun with “Moth” and “The Long-legged Fly.” BLACK HORNET (Carroll & Graf: $18.95; 150 pp.) is what is now called a “prequel,” looking at Lew Griffin in 1968, early in his days as a private investigator with an edgy and usually defensive relationship with the police.

Technically the novel is a thriller; a rooftop sniper is reducing the population of New Orleans at a terrible rate and has to be brought down, as Lew ultimately helps to do. But defining the book as a thriller is as inexact as calling “Silence of the Lambs” a story about eating habits.

The trilogy is, thus far, a three-part examination of a black man with the gifts and soul of an intellectual, hanging on in a hostile environment in which he finds himself an anomaly, a kind of stateless, free-floating figure forced (the other choices are hopelessly self-destructive) to be true to his own solitary ideals.

The killer’s scheme has a racist edge. It remains for Lew to discover just how complicated (and sorrowful) the racial motivations were. Sallis’ theme is in some part memory, but it’s hard to think of a protagonist other than Lew Griffin paraphrasing Jean Goytisolo’s autobiography “Realms of Strife” on the impossibility of converting memory into words.

Sallis writes: “Our reconstructions of the past will always be a kind of betrayal. Put down your pen, Goytisolo says . . . for silence alone can keep intact our illusion of truth.” Yes, the reader might say to Sallis, and no.

In LIFE ITSELF by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Beth Hensen, (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 210 pp.), a mystery writer named Jose Daniel Fierro, who is fond of paraphrasing American private eye writers, is prevailed upon to become chief of police of a (fictional) mining city north of Mexico City, where a left-wing party has ousted the administration of the country’s long-ruling government.

Taibo, a Mexican historian, has previously used crime fiction as a carrier for his raging disgust at the corruption in the government, including the police and the “yellow,” government-controlled unions. To make the point even more emphatic, he killed off the protagonist of a previous series in “No Happy Ending,” which certainly wasn’t.

The new book qualifies as a bitter comedy. The city’s one police car is an ancient, rust-consumed VW. The two previous chiefs of police have been assassinated. While a kind of free-lance radio station plays “We Shall Overcome” constantly, there is throughout a sense that these foolish idealists are on a very short leash indeed and that it’s just a matter of time until the federales make their move. But Fierro’s letters to his life back in Mexico City are unfailingly cheerful. “Send me the aspirin and the blue turtleneck sweater I’ve asked you for.”

There are, of course, murders, conspiracies, attempted assassinations; and Fierro, far out of his depth, tries to cope. In the end, Fierro, quoting a MacDonald line about Lew Archer, could have been speaking of himself: “He was less a man of action than a man of interrogation, a conscience from which the significance of other lives emerged.” But that can be said of Taibo himself, because rarely does crime fiction carry such a weight of indicting commentary.

“The Sculptress,” by the English writer Minette Walters, was an engrossingly lurid tale that won this year’s Edgar as best mystery (and was one of my 10 best for 1993). Her new book, THE SCOLD’S BRIDLE (St. Martin’s: $21.95; 336 pp.) , is much more ambitious work, eerie in its own way and fascinating in the author’s ability to generate bent characters and abrasive relationships that are by her skill made mesmerizing and even sympathetic rather than off-putting.

The device of the title was evidently an iron cage that fit over the head, held the tongue and prevented speech, a medieval punishment for nagging women. One such device, at least, had survived into modern times and was in place, garlanded with posies, on an elderly woman discovered nude and dead in her bathtub with her wrists slashed.

She has left her fortune to her doctor, Sarah Blakeney, whom she’d known only briefly, rather than to her estranged, druggy daughter or her thieving granddaughter. The doctor is briefly a suspect in the unlamented old woman’s murder (it was, naturally). She becomes the novel’s protagonist, abetted by an unorthodox policeman, a sort of lower-rank Miagret.

The suspense of the novel is the digging out the dead woman’s horrendous family past. Like Ruth Rendell, whom Walters resembles in her fondness for the aberrant, expressed in singularly precise and elegant prose, Walters knows the cruel kinkiness that can lurk behind the most sedate of facades. The denouement, if well-motivated, comes a bit from left field, but the getting to it, and watching the delineation of the principals, is all the fun, and it is considerable.

Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder series, now a dozen long and containing such glories as “When the Sacred Ginmill Closes,” is one of the sure things in crime fiction and A LONG LINE OF DEAD MEN (Morrow: $20; 320 pp.) carries it forward with a fine flourish. Admittedly it leans heavily on Scudder’s life- style to bolster a contrived premise (he is a recovering alcohol and an unfrocked cop now an unlicensed private eye, with two women in his life, one full-time, one part-time). But Scudder is so interesting, who cares?

There is a tradition of the last man club--an institution popular after World War I--in which the survivors meet to celebrate until only one is left to drink a ceremonial bottle of wine laid down at the first meeting. In this case there is no bottle of wine, only a promise that the last man will form a new club to carry on a line allegedly reaching back to Babylonia. But somebody has been knocking off the members at a clip exceeding the glummest actuarial predictions. One of the survivors asks Scudder to see what’s what.

It’s like a procedural investigation of a locked room mystery. Is one of the survivors doing the faked suicides, arranged accidents and seemingly random shootings? In between sessions of affectionate and enthusiastic sex, Scudder discovers the miscreant and sees to a fiendishly clever punishment, such as might delight readers of Evelyn Waugh.

It’s a welcome visit with an old friend.

Historical mysteries are a growing sub-genre within crime fiction and Leonard Tourney’s Joan and Matthew Stock series, set in Elizabethan times, is one of the surest-handed. FROBISHER’S SAVAGE (St. Martin’s: $20.95; 304 pp.) takes off from the fact that the 16th-Century English explorer Martin Frobisher brought back to London an Eskimo captured on Greenland during Frobisher’s unsuccessful search for a northwest passage to China.

Here the captive, named Adam Nemo by the Brits, ends as a servant at a country estate after many a demeaning, disorienting experience in London. His earlier life is becoming a fast-fading dream, his only friend is a mute boy on the next farm. Now the farm family, except for the boy, has been brutally murdered, and Adam and the boy are prime suspects, each being in his way an outcast.

Tourney’s carefully plotted book is a parable on mob violence, the manipulation of opinion by planted gossip and the narrow margin by which truth may win over miscarriages of justice, if it does. As in earlier volumes, the real star of the piece is Joan rather than her earnest clothier husband. The ending is not without tragedy and there is an extremely eloquent passage on Adam, adrift again.

Los Angeles author Rochelle Majer Krich has made Jewish life in the city her special province. “Till Death Us Do Part,” a paperback original, was a fascinating mystery involving the difficulties of a wife obtaining a divorce under Jewish tradition.

Her protagonist, detective Jessica Drake, introduced in “Fair Game” (a serial murdered plotting his crimes on a Monopoly board), is not Jewish, but the plot in ANGEL OF DEATH (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 384 pp.) centers on a parade through a Jewish section in mid-town by neo-Nazis and others who deny the existence of the Holocaust. Violence precedes the parade, a death occurs during it and more violence follows.

A Jewish lawyer who defends the First Amendment rights of the neo-Nazis is estranged from his own parents and decried by other Jews who feel he has betrayed his own heritage. He is killed by a car bomb and Drake must sort out the tangle of motivations, involving both Jews and anti-Semites, for the bombing.

It is an unusual choice of material for a crime novel but it creates a high seriousness that is also unusual in a crime novel. Krich, who teaches English at Yeshiva High School and manages to write while also raising six children, has made a swift advance from paperback originals to hardcovers and, this time, an author tour of several cities. It is deserved recognition, because she uses her well-plotted stories and roundly depicted characters to give a sympathetic, close-up portrait of what for many readers may be largely unfamiliar terrain.

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