OF THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE CRIMINAL

Author: By Robin W. Winks

Date: SUNDAY, October 26, 1997

Page: N3

Section: Books

So I thought about this ruse as I read my thrillers. Here was ``a.k.a. Jane,'' a first novel by Maureen Tan (Mysterious Press, $22), which tells the unlikely tale of a British operative, Jane Nichols, who spies, kills, and lies for MI-5, and who uses Max Murdock, writer of tough-guy prose, as a cover. Tan gives us several examples of Murdock's writing, and they are truly and intentionally bad; Nichols, the operative, seems far better, and she keeps the pages turning. Traumatized by the death of her love, Nichols takes herself off to Savannah, Ga., to kill her lover's assassin, and during this unauthorized foray, she finds a new lover in the local sheriff.

Savannah is all historic houses and murky swamps, rattlesnakes coil in the gardens of good and evil, and the whole adventure is such a wonderfully good bad book, it took me back to the time when junk was taken from the printed page and not off the small screen. For anyone nostalgic for those utterly improbable boys-and-girls adventures that some of us, at least, read back in the 1940s, this book is a lift (allowing, of course, for a bit of dicey language here and there).

The next book in the stack tried the same trick. ``Gypsy Hearts'' by Robert M. Eversz (Grove/Atlantic, $23), is described as ``darkly comic,'' words which make my heart sink, but for once this is a fair description. Richard Milhouse Miller, nicknamed ``Nix,'' is a Hollywood con man who takes himself off to postcommunist Prague to lie and steal his way into the hearts and beds of the naive. Every now and then his Hollywood background leads him to spout ``inspired fiction,'' of which ``You can't do this! I'm an American citizen!'' and an Eastern European policeman's demand, ``Up against the wall, American schweinhund!'' become privileged texts. I don't remember that the dialogue in those old World II movies was this bad, but perhaps it was. The rest of the prose is positively sparkling by comparison.

Most books do not have two styles, though they may present eerie echoes. This does not mean they lack quality, and if the echoes are of a writer one enjoys, they may read well. To my ear, Paul Bishop sounds a lot like James Crumley, and that is high praise indeed. Try ``Tequila Mockingbird'' (this year's most successful punning title) (Scribner, $22). Fey Croaker is a West Los Angeles homicide detective. A decorated detective assigned to an antiterrorist unit is shot and killed in front of the police station by his pregnant wife. Though this looks like ordinary vengeance for sleeping around, Fey thinks otherwise, especially when she is told not to dig too deeply. The treachery and countertreachery is well set out in serviceable prose.

Margaret Coel is occupying Tony Hillerman turf, and she is the best challenger so far. ``The Dream Stalker'' (Berkley, $21.95) takes place on the Wind River Reservation, where a nuclear waste storage site is to be built. The Arapaho Indians are divided, most of the whites are greedy, there is a Jesuit priest who isn't, and though the writing is a bit plodding, so was Hillerman in his first two or three books. Coel is worth watching.

Most worth watching, however, is Anne Landsman, whose ``The Devil's Chimney'' (Soho, $24) is a strong debut. There is fine writing, good writing, and a little less than either, as she tells the story of the Cango Caves in South Africa, where a ``colored'' servant girl once disappeared; of an upper-class Englishwoman who, at the turn of the century, tries to run an ostrich farm; and of a woman who runs a kennel for the South African Tourist Board and who becomes fixated with these two stories. The author explores all those adventures of the soul that tempt one into florid prose -- sin, sexual passion, race, magical realist landscapes of the mind and at the horizon, greed, duplicity -- and nearly always steps back before it's too late. Landsman is a watcher in the shadows, and in the end she pushes everyone into the glare of the sun.

Between the two debut novels in my stack, between Maureen Tan and Anne Landsman, falls a shadow, and somewhere in that shadow most readers will find prose they will consider to be good. That's how, in the end, one learns to write. By reading.