THE IVORY COASTBy Charles FlemingSt. Martin’s Minotaur:416...

THE IVORY COAST

By Charles Fleming

St. Martin’s Minotaur:

416 pp., $24.95

“That’s Pearl Bailey, over there. And that’s Frank Sinatra, at the bar, with that drunk Dean Martin. And Joey Bishop, who you met before.” This is Deacon, a trumpeter who blows like Chet Baker, squiring a girl named Anita around Las Vegas, pointing out the local color. Like Deacon, Charles Fleming, in “The Ivory Coast,” offers an impressive tour of Vegas in the ‘50s, a place that has as much to do with rat finks as it does with the Rat Pack.

It’s not only as a player that Deacon resembles Baker: Like Gerry Mulligan’s legendary sideman, Deacon is handsome, slightly haunted and addicted to junk. But this neo-noir exploration of the Strip’s underbelly also gives Deacon some Philip Marlowe qualities: He’s tough, stoic and as handy with weaponry as he is with “Stardust.” When the town’s first black-run casino is set to open, operated by former boxer Worthless Worthington Jones but backed by an imperious white casino lord, Deacon finds himself swept up in a swirl of danger and falling hard for Anita, a 17-year-old truck-stop waitress. Amid all the hard-boiled James Ellroy-inspired drama--of crooked cops, mob payoffs and tabloid-ready perversion--what emerges here is a surprisingly sensitive story about the historic daringness and personal sacrifices that made integration possible. Yet Fleming, whose previous book was a biography of the notorious Hollywood producer Don Simpson, never loses sight of the neon-lit sleaze of Las Vegas, making this sure-bet thriller as satisfyingly sordid as it is socially responsible.

*

THE STARS CAN WAIT

By Jay Basu

Henry Holt: 180 pp., $21

Jay Basu’s debut novella is a delicate fable that unfolds during the German occupation of Poland. It’s about 15-year-old Gracian Sofka, growing up in the sooty mining village of Male{nacutel}kowice in the region of Upper Silesia. As a German bureaucrat tells Gracian’s older brother, Pawel, when he applies for a job in a German-run mine, “Silesians and your countrymen do not exist. Historically they have not existed, for they inhabited a nation so weak and confused in itself as not to exist. They have always been nothing but vessels--empty glasses--for the filling and discarding of others.”

Perhaps it is this feeling of neither-nor-ness, so ruthlessly enforced by the Nazis, that drives Gracian to his obsession with stargazing and the patriotic Pawel to his shadowy anti-German exploits as a dealer in smuggled goods. When Pawel gets hold of a telescope for Gracian, it is this generous gift that begins to transform Gracian’s relationship to the universe. Gazing through this powerful tool, Gracian discovers his faith in the fixity of the stars beginning to waver, and he develops new ways at seeing Pawel’s formerly invisible and potentially deadly exploits. If “The Stars Can Wait” seems metaphorically pat and excessively lyrical, it is, in the end, a seductive meditation on fraternal love amid the larger disintegrations of war.

*

WAVEMAKER II

By Mary-Beth Hughes

Atlantic Monthly Press: 224 pp., $24

Mary-Beth Hughes’ enigmatic and challenging debut manages to dovetail the numerous improbable story lines generated by the Clemens family, well-heeled suburbanites living outside New York City in 1964. There’s father Will, who takes the fall for some unspecified wrongdoing related to the odious crony of Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and is sent upstate for a year in prison. There’s son Bo, putting up a brave fight against the cancer he’s barely old enough to understand. His younger sister Lou-Lou, meanwhile, is shunted off with a neighbor family where she endures misunderstandings, loneliness and sexual predation from the other kids. At the heart of it all is Kay, Will’s beautiful 29-year-old wife, trying to keep everyone’s life from falling apart.

This is a novella that reads like an epic: part prison story, hospital-ward drama, family tragedy and historical flight of fancy. Like Kay, Hughes manages--barely--to keep things together with understated will and undefeatable elegance. At times, the tension Hughes creates is unbearable, as “Wavemaker II,” named after a pleasure boat, steers its jagged course between “marital whispers and judicial torpedoes.”

Hughes’ habit of leaving out important information only drives the reader deeper into the odd realm of this novel of stem-cell therapies, Scotch-fueled Memorial Day parties, sentencing hearings, grammar-school politics and the conniving machinations of Cohn, who continues to achieve larger-than-life status here, even as he’s relegated to a supporting role. But Cohn’s presence cannot be underestimated: As the Clemens family’s secret ally, he embodies “Wavemaker II’s” disturbingly ambivalent notions of loyalty and love.