CRIMINAL PURSUITS

William Lashner’s excellent first novel, HOSTILE WITNESS (Regan Books/HarperCollins: $23; 501 pp.), confronts us with that familiar crime fiction figure, the burnt-out lawyer. The present sufferer is Victor Carl, whose pride and integrity have been casualties of a long down slide that has seen his two partners split, one of them taking the firm’s most lucrative cases with him.

Lashner himself is a Philadelphia lawyer who is also a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Program. He creates in Carl a living embodiment of a previously unspoken maxim, “Absolute failure corrupts absolutely”--the glum underside of Lord Acton’s comment on absolute power.

When a posh main line firm offers Carl a case, defending a local alderman’s aide who, like the politician, is up on murder and racketeering charges, Carl is ready. Is he ever. The blandishments are so suspiciously sweet that a blind man would know it’s a setup, and Carl isn’t blind. But he’s so hungry he’s pathetically eager to sell out.

The novel, long and thickly, knowledgeably detailed, charts the slow dawning of reality, as Carl perceives what a chump he is and, worse, that he’s being paid to keep quiet so his unsuspecting client will take the rap for his boss. What to do? Or is it too late already?

Lashner melds a special kind of procedural investigation with an unusual and engrossing courtroom drama. Carl is double-chumped, so to speak, via seduction, as Lashner sustains a rich and nourishing flow of surprises, manipulated by an interestingly seamy cast of characters on both sides of the law. It is quite a dazzling debut.

Eleanor Taylor Bland, one of the best of the too-few black women writing crime fiction, brings back Marti MacAlister, a black homicide detective, for her third appearance, in DONE WRONG (St. Martin’s Press: $20.95, 216 pp.).

MacAlister quit the Chicago PD after her undercover narcotics squad husband Johnny was shot/murdered/committed suicide; take your pick. The official conclusion, suicide, smelled of cover-up. Marti fled to the police force in a smaller, quieter nearby city called Prairie Village that suggests Waukegan, where Taylor actually lives.

Now another undercover cop in Chicago has died in similarly suspicious circumstances, and the new widow draws Marti into investigating both deaths. She finds a large can of worms, which, once opened, produces new violence.

At that, what gives the novel, like its predecessors, power and resonance, is Marti herself, trying to raise two teen-agers in a memory-haunted house, and finding common cause with friends both black and white. Avenging her husband’s death won’t bring him back, but it could be a way of restarting her own life. There is, refreshingly, not a stereotype in view.

Karen Kijewski, the ex-bartender who writes about a Sacramento private eye named Kat Colorado, in ALLEY KAT BLUES (Doubleday: $22.95; 342 pp.) has her commuting to Las Vegas. There her longtime boy friend is a homicide detective, presently trying to find and stop a serial killer of young prostitutes.

The novel is a curious work. Kat is not quite so side-of-the-mouth wisecracky as is her custom, and the cracks seem oddly pro forma. The story is as much about the boyfriend’s obsession over the crimes, and about his infidelity, of sorts, to Kat. But the story is also concerned--obsessed, even--with the role of women within the Mormon faith, a voiceless servitude about which Kat, via Kijewski, has nothing favorable to say.

The author creates a complicated and vivid nondenominational villainess. The male villains are less complicated, not quite as vivid but thoroughly nasty hypocrites. Kijewski’s ambitious novel savages Las Vegas which, as usual, retains its lurid fascination, and there is fascination as well in the author’s theological anger.

Sharyn McCrumb is alternately very serious and very funny and it is sometimes bemusing to think that the author of “Bimbos of the Death Star” also wrote “She Walks These Hills” and other evocative stories of Appalachia. Even within her series on the forensic anthropologist Elizabeth MacPherson, the McCrumb tone varies.

In IF I’D KILLED HIM WHEN I MET HIM . . . (Ballatine Books: $20; 320 pp.) McCrumb is by some legerdemain both dead serious and very lively. Her heroine, reconsidering her life because her Scots husband has evidently been lost at sea, is doing some investigating for her brother’s law firm. One client is a woman accused of murdering her abusive ex-husband and his new young wife; another client is a woman under suspicion of poisoning her bigamist preacher husband.

The title is the forepart of a battered and imprisoned wife’s comment, which says in full, “If I’d killed him when I met him, I’d be out of prison by now.” As a frontispiece McCrumb uses a quote from Dickens: Don’t suppose, he said, “that I ever write merely to amuse, or without an object.”

Nor McCrumb. The one case is an interesting forensic tale of arsenic minus the old lace. The other case, pursued by MacPherson’s brother’s fiery feminist partner, A. P. Hill, is about abused wives and the short-shrift they often receive in the legal system after they have been goaded beyond endurance and struck back.

Hill is feisty enough to be amusing, but her closing summary in defense of the woman who shot her husband is supremely moving and eloquent. Did it sway the jury? Please.

Robert Crais, born in Louisiana, presently living in Los Angeles, writes about a wisecracking private eye named Elvis Cole. But in his new novel, VOODOO RIVER (Hyperion: $21.95; 298 pp.) Crais could well echo Dickens and McCrumb in the matter of books being about something, in his case adoption, race and fame.

Cole is hired to find, or find out about, the biological parents of a TV star named Jodi Taylor, who is 36 and ostensibly wants to know what genetic tendencies toward cancer or heart disease she might have inherited. But nothing is ever simple. Jodi isn’t being quite candid. Somebody’s been on the trail already and got lots of the Louisiana folks murderously riled up, even before Cole rolls into town.

Crais tells a super-active tale, with plenty of local color, including a massive old turtle who lives in a catfish breeding pond. The larger issues are raised rather than tidily concluded (not that they often are), but they give a resonance to his story.

The prestigious Oxford University Press, whose anthologies of prose and poetry reflect high standards, has surprisingly but admirably just published HARDBOILED: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN CRIME STORIES (Oxford University Press: $25; 532 pp.) Edited by the Anglo-American team of Jack Adrian and Bill Pronzini, the collection ranges chronologically from Dashiell Hammett and W. R. Burnett in the 1920s, when the hard-boiled style emerged as a recognizable sub-genre of crime fiction, to James Ellroy and Lawrence Block in the ‘90s.

The 36 stories (some of which have not been anthologized before and none of which suffer from over-anthologizing) are by an honor roll of American authors, among them James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler (inevitably), John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Ross Macdonald, Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain and Jim Thompson.

A thoughtful introduction salutes the role of Spillane in revitalizing the genre. The authors remark on the rise of issue-oriented writing in the ‘70s and beyond (as more and more problems beset the society). Now the hard-boiled style is newly fashionable, say Pronzini and Adrian. Quentin Tarrantino is “the high priest of designer violence . . . who plunders the plots of old films and 1940s pulp fiction.” The problem, say the authors, is that in the new treatment “characters lose their humanity and become mere symbols.” And Hammett once remarked in a letter that it’s hard to relate to a symbol, no matter how well they’re written.

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Farewell, My Lovely: With this column, I retire from my stewardship of “Criminal Pursuits.” I’ve written 93 columns over a period of nearly eight years. I’ve reviewed something close to 600 books, which is plenty. I’ve enjoyed very nearly every minute of it, but mostly especially the excitement of coming upon fine new voices, from Patricia Cornwell and Walter Mosley to Thomas Cook and Michael Connelly.

I continue to think that some of the best writing in the country is being done in crime fiction, and that it is detailing our times to a degree that tomorrow’s social historians will have to pay heed to.

From time to time I hope to do single reviews in and out of the mystery field. Meantime I most gratefully turn over to younger eyes the task of sorting through as many as 50 titles a month.