Death in the Blue Bat Bar : A Hilarious and Horrible Mystery : THE EDGE OF THE CRAZIES, <i> By Jamie Harrison (Hyperion: $20.95; 321 pp.)</i>

It is singularly disconcerting to awaken muzzy from an overlong evening at the all-too-real Owl Bar in Livingston, Mont., incapable of any further motion than reaching for the book on the bedside table . . . and to read about the shooting of a hung-over man who has spent an overlong evening in the fictional Blue Bat Bar in Blue Deer, Mont.

Yes, the Blue Bat is the Owl, and Blue Deer is Livingston, and uncomfortable as it may be, unvarnished truth about my place of residence is the stock in trade of Jamie Harrison. But “The Edge of the Crazies” is refreshing for what it is not: This is not the usual romanticized travel-guide picture of Montana, but rather a documentary photograph, grainy but focused, with plenty of sex, booze and death to hold the eye. This book also isn’t “Kinsey Milhone Moves to Montana” (this description is more on the mark for the work of Montana’s other newly successful mystery-writing woman, Sandra West Prowell). There are resonances of James Crumley here, and Joe Gores and Jon Jackson, but this book is, in fact, anything but formulaic, which is refreshing indeed.

Harrison’s harsh verity is leavened with humor--cynical, wise, grown-up humor that makes reading the book an uncomfortable pleasure, like sneaking a shot of whiskey before 10 a.m. She has peopled Blue Deer with wonderful characters, particularly the women. Oh, the women! Take Mona, for instance: braying, alcohol-raddled, promiscuous, corpulent wife of shooting victim George Blackwater (who, in all fairness, shares most of those characteristics); or Ada, acid-tongued, power-crazy, equally promiscuous small-town newspaper publisher, “mean as a snake in a county that seems increasingly packed with vicious people.” Both of them are used to getting what they want, but Harrison makes sure they also get what they deserve.

Her protagonist is Jules Clement, an archeologist turned reluctant sheriff--complex, flawed, even tortured in the finest tradition of Archer or Sugrue or Mulheisen. There’s trouble in tiny Blue Deer: First the hung-over Mr. Blackwater, a hideously successful screenwriter, is shot in his office, seriously but not fatally. Then Mona turns up dead (and gnawed-on by feral dogs--a nice touch) on the banks of the Yellowstone River, which flows through Livingston, er, Blue Deer.

And that’s just for starters. Jules Clement’s life gets very much more complicated after that. This is a wonderfully imaginative, ordered plot, full of fraternal rivalry, psychosexual rage and Clement’s own ghosts, including that of his father, who was the sheriff until his death in the line of duty 25 years earlier. We are sent spinning backward into a small town’s past, and the dark secrets that lie there, like huge, ancient, shovel-nosed brown trout in a slow side channel of the river.

The Yellowstone flows anything but slowly in the book; its flood provides a nice counterpoint to Blue Deer’s epidemic of less natural violence. When the small-town sheriff’s office, accustomed to dealing with nothing more difficult than a few drunks and the occasional domestic dispute, suddenly finds itself under siege, the procedural aspects of this dilemma are presented with humor and understanding.

This is a narrative that depends not upon gimmickry but rather upon sound psychological character development. The ending is powerful and manages, if not to surprise, at least to leave the reader satisfied that no cheap tricks have been pulled; every bit of the story is plausible given what we are told about Blue Deer and its denizens. And one of the pleasures of “The Edge of the Crazies” is that we’re told a great deal. There’s nothing worse than becoming intrigued with a place or a character in a mystery and being left feeling deprived of detail when it’s over. This is a surprisingly rich novel, intricate without becoming sluggish, not an easy thing for any writer to achieve, and all the more unusual in a first novel.

Harrison’s love of food and her not inconsiderable knowledge of it (including an ability to tell the difference between good and bad, which is not nearly so common a skill as most people think) give readers an enjoyable subtext. This was the only place where I felt the influence of the author’s justly celebrated father, the novelist, poet and legendary trencherman Jim Harrison--and what a wonderful thing that is for a father to pass along.

But woven far deeper into this fine-point tapestry of Jules Clement’s and Blue Deer’s day-to-day life is a far more substantive leitmotif--the changing culture of the West and its relationship to the constant of human passion that knows no geography. “The Edge of the Crazies” is an auspicious debut, though it is by any standard a polished and eminently readable mystery novel. Harrison has a contract for four Jules Clement tales, and readers of this one will certainly be looking forward to the rest.