OF BASEBALL, SPIES, AND THE LOVED CLASSIC

Author: By Robin W. Winks

Date: SUNDAY, September 28, 1997

Page: F2

Section: Books

Here we are, visiting Cooperstown, watching a motorboat on Otsego Lake, when a former major leaguer crashes his car and is not rescued in time (before the car blows up, which always happens in books and on television) by an ex-cop who is nearby. We ramble along to Cape Cod, and down to Sarasota, and scorecards and lifetime batting averages help provide clues to what all the action is about, and the book romps right along, as pleasant as a day at the ballpark. Half the pleasure is in the mystery, half in the baseball, and it all adds up to a good yarn.

While still in this autobiographical mood I found myself in New Mexico, passing through Hatch and thinking about chiles, when Robert Littell's new spy thriller, ``Walking Back the Cat'' (Overlook Press, $22.95), came to hand. The opening scene is set in Hatch: An agent, code-named Parsifal, is talking by phone with his cut-out and is soon poking about on Apache land to check out how a casino is being used as a pass-through for money and, as we might guess, other activities. I am very high on Littell (``The Defection of A. J. Lewinter'' is a ``classic,'' since I say so), but this book is a bit of a disappointment. Still, how can one resist that New Mexico landscape and sentences like ``He remembered what Eskeltsetle had told Sonseeahray when she was still called Ishkaynay''? The jacket says Littell lives in France, and I think he knows as much about New Mexico as I know about baseball, but it is fun to see him demonstrate the principle of walking back the cat, which (he tells us) means retracing an intelligence operation to find the source of a deception.

So I walked back my personal cat, courtesy of the Library of America, which has issued a quite wonderful two-volume collection containing 11 novels, all relatively short, under the omnibus title ``Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s'' and ``American Noir of the 1950s'' ($35 each). The books were assembled by Robert Polito, who provides some useful and unobtrusive notes. Here are some of the very earliest books I read in the genre -- James M. Cain's ``The Postman Always Rings Twice,'' Horace McCoy's ``They Shoot Horses, Don't They?'', Kenneth Fearing's ``The Big Clock,'' Jim Thompson's ``The Killer Inside Me,'' and others that easily keep the same company. It was interesting to discover that I still like what I liked then, and equally dislike what I disliked then (Patricia Highsmith's ``The Talented Mr. Ripley''), and that I apparently haven't changed one damned bit. Anyone who could still dislike baseball for going on 50 years because of a quarter of a point can be expected to display the foolish consistency of a small mind.

And by this path I found myself reading the appropriately titled ``Comeback'' by Richard Stark (Mysterious Press, $18), who is also Donald E. Westlake. As Stark, Westlake wrote a series of trim and tight pulp-fiction novels about a professional criminal and hard man, Parker (just like Spenser, and no, not just like Morse), to whom he now returns. The tale is classic noir, about the robbing of an evangelist, the falling out amongst the thieves, the unnecessary death of someone who knew just a little but not enough to stay alive, and four duffel bags full of cash. Follow the money is always sound advice, and Stark/Westlake keeps us doing that right to the end.

So there it is, little bits of the past, of reading habits and poor taste, odd journeys and immature reflections, from which come a few moments of reading. One could do worse, and one could do better. At least, while in Cooperstown, I didn't go to the Corvette Americana Hall of Fame.