Latest, and Perhaps Best, Entry in Dunbar’s Series Gets Personal

Due to one of the more incomprehensible vagaries of the publishing industry, Tony Dunbar’s thoroughly entertaining series about raffish New Orleans attorney Tubby Dubonnet has taken a tumble from hardcover to paperback original. This may be good news for fans, who now can relish Tubby’s often hilarious exploits at a reduced price. Unfortunately, it also means that the newest entry in the series, “Lucky Man” (Dell: 227 pages, $5.99), may not get the attention it deserves and apparently needs to keep Tubby gainfully employed.

This sixth and arguably best of Tubby’s adventures finds the usually upbeat lawyer in a depressed mood. He’s facing a lonely Thanksgiving. His efficient secretary has given notice. His best pal, Raisin Partlow, has degenerated into a belligerent drunk. Even his beloved city has suddenly turned dirty and desolate. Tubby can’t figure out if the quality of life has taken a nose dive or if his abstinence from alcohol is giving him a suddenly clear perspective on reality. Whatever else sobriety has accomplished, it’s definitely sharpened his wits. A good thing, too, because the new sanctimonious and vengeful district attorney, Marcus Dementhe, is on his case. He’s pressuring Tubby’s pal and client, Judge Al Hughes, to snitch on his fellow jurists. He’s also threatening to go public with information about Tubby’s eldest daughter that even the lawyer knew nothing about.

In the novel’s course, we’re introduced to a couple of corpses (one dispatched by the unique device of ingested casino chips), the theft of a speedboat, several spectacular meals and an assortment of intriguing characters, including Purvis, who lives in a crawl space under a house; Lucky LaFrene, super car salesman and malapropism master (“Let’s retire to my inner sanctotum”); and a cop with the terrific name of Johnny Vodka. But what distinguishes this excellent series entry is its protagonist’s more personal adventures, including one in which Tubby and his now-adult daughter arrive at their first meeting of minds. They hug and cry. “Life sure is funny,” she tells him. “If you’re lucky,” he replies. Mystery fans will want to share their luck.

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Picture Miss Marple in a bar, passed out on vodka with a partially smoked stogie between her fingers, and you’ll have a good idea of the new crime-solver fashioned by Parnell Hall in “A Clue for the Puzzle Lady” (Bantam: 292 pages, $23.95). Hall is a playful novelist whose two previous series sleuths have been slightly skewed versions of classic masculine genre heroes--the private eye (Stanley Hastings) and the criminal attorney (Steve Winslow). In presenting his take on Marple and her sisters in the cozy mystery, Hall has come up with the remarkable Miss Cora Felton, an oft-married, alcoholic woman of a certain age whose benign, motherly countenance adorns the nationally syndicated newspaper column “The Puzzle Lady.” In her first brush with murder and mayhem, she and her niece Sherry have barely settled down in the little town of Bakerhaven, Conn., when the hapless police chief seeks her help in solving a crossword puzzle found on the body of a murdered teenage girl.

What neither the chief nor the other readers of her column know is that Felton isn’t the real puzzle lady. That would be her niece, who not only concocts the daily puzzles, but created the column and the character so perfectly illustrated by her aunt’s Mary Worth-like physiognomy. Another author might be tempted to simply let Sherry solve the crime, a Watson who does the work while the ersatz Sherlock takes the bows. Instead, Hall has chosen to make Cora his amateur sleuth-protagonist, albeit an inebriated, undependable yet strangely effective one. Staggering from clue to clue, picking up key information at card games and verbally jousting with nearly everyone she meets, she gets the job done. So does Hall, who has successfully launched an anti-cozy series charming enough for even cozy lovers to enjoy.

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Edna Buchanan’s “Garden of Evil” (Avon Twilight: 321 pages, $24) begins with a bang, literally. Her continuing protagonist, Miami crime reporter Britt Montero, arrives on the scene of a car crash to discover a headless driver and a passenger in the back seat with a shotgun. It’s a dope deal gone sour, a cop explains. The driver and his brother had tried to take off with a street merchant’s drugs. The merchant jumped halfway into the moving vehicle, the brother’s shotgun discharged, and a headless driver kept the pedal to the metal until the car met a concrete planter. It’s an attention-grabbing part of that day’s Miami mayhem mosaic but, as Buchanan amusingly points out, not unique enough to rate much newspaper space.

A slightly more promising story starts to develop when Montero is approached by a former beauty queen who claims to have dodged two attempted assassinations. But the woman’s family and friends discredit her story.

The reporter moves on to something that appears to be more substantial, scoop-wise--a phone call from a beautiful serial murderer known as the Kiss Me Killer, who has been turned into a fan by Montero’s account of her latest slaying. Subsequent telephone conversations lead to a police-supervised meeting that, as any reader of suspense novels knows, is destined to fail, placing its female protagonist in jeopardy. That occurs just after the novel’s halfway point. Until then, Buchanan and the likable Montero have taken us on their usual fast-paced, well-informed tour of the shadowy corners of the city, pausing for some personal matters (in this case, a possible marriage proposal). Once the feisty Britt becomes the subdued kidnap victim of the vicious killer, however, the book’s vitality seems to drain away, replaced by a standard survival yarn that offers nothing particularly new or interesting on the subject.

The Times reviews mysteries every other week.