FINDING THE DISTAFF TOUCH IN THE WRITING OF MYSTERY FICTION

Author: By Robin W. Winks

Date: SUNDAY, December 28, 1997

Page: L3

Section: Books

Writers like Amanda Cross, Margaret Yorke, and Laurie R. King give us a good deal more. Seldom do guns figure in their books, and if there is one it's as likely to be used as a paperweight as it is to kill. Death is measured out in small, lethal drops, and words are often as not the blunt instrument that kills. In ``A Question of Belief'' (Mysterious Press, $23), Yorke unfolds a tale of small-minded betrayal that tells us, as have her 40 previous books, that evil does exist in the world and that it is not the creation of theologists or psychoanalysts. What should we believe about ourselves, our husbands and wives, our friends, what are we entitled to take for granted as a matter of trust, what must we believe for survival, whatever we may suspect? Here an innocuous salesman, wrongly accused of rape by a customer, loses his job, the moral support of his wife and children, and his identity. Faking his death, he tries to start life over, but his path brings him across the kinds of marginal and sometimes mad people he has never noticed before, and in the end he is destroyed. Nuanced though the story is, Yorke is not a bit ambiguous in her own beliefs.

Neither is Amanda Cross. a.k.a. Carolyn Heilbrun, who has long demonstrated that it is possible to live in two worlds simultaneously. As the Avalon professor at Columbia, she developed feminist theory and the literature of androgyny, and as the author of the Kate Fansler mysteries, set in and around a university that seems remarkably like Columbia, she has shown the applicability of those theories to human situations. In ``The Puzzled Heart'' (Ballantine, $21), the 12th book in the series, Kate Fansler is contacted by someone -- terrorists? an angry student? a chimera of her imagination? -- who tells her that her husband, Reed, has been kidnapped. He is certainly gone. The title is from Emily Dickinson, who sought an unpuzzled heart; Kate Fansler will not find it. Cross is wise in the ways of academe, and her figures speak in literate, complete sentences, which surely is a requirement for nuanced ambiguity.

I always enjoy Laurie King. She has created two series, one about a contemporary lesbian detective, the other about Mary Russell, biblical scholar of Oxford, who is married to Sherlock Holmes. Most Sherlockian pastiche does not work, but King has the tone, mood, and voice precisely right. She even convinces us that her two protagonists most likely have lively sexual lives.

In ``The Moor'' (St. Martin's, $23.95), Holmes revisits the scenes of ``The Hound of the Baskervilles''; Dartmoor is depicted as a ``living presence''; and Sabine Baring-Gould, Victorian/Edwardian hymnist and antiquarian, is given a key role to play. ``The Moor''' is not quite as good as ``The Beekeeper's Apprentice,'' which initiated the Russell-Holmes romance, or ``A Letter of Mary,'' which raised troubling issues about Mary Magdelene as an apostle, but it is very good -- as satisfying at this time of year as a truly rich Christmas fruitcake.

Another Holmes pastiche, ``The Star of India'' (St. Martin's, $21.95) by Carole Bugge, is less successful but, as a first novel, nonetheless quite entertaining. Holmes is pitted against Professor Moriarty again; he finds that his dear Mrs. Hudson's life is threatened; he and Watson sally forth as of old. The fruitcake is a bit thin, the settings less convincing, but this book, too, is well above average for a mock-Holmes.

``The Best of Sisters in Crime,'' edited by Marilyn Wallace (Berkley Prime Crime, $21.95), brings together short stories from previous ``Sisters in Crime'' anthologies. Nearly all the stories are good, and nearly all speak to my increased attraction to writers who know that crime turns upon family relations, on cooking and pets and loneliness. True, all the motivations for murder are here: greed, lust, revenge. But in the hands of Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Grafton, Dorothy Cannell, and Diane Mott Davidson, they are served up quite differently than in the most recent Shamus collection.

I always save the best on my plate for last. ``Murder & Other Acts of Literature'' (St. Martin's, $24.95), edited by reviewer/critic Michele Slung, is a superior collection of short stories demonstrating that murder is central to the work of many nongenre writers. Here one finds Rudyard Kipling, Patrick O'Brian, Nadine Gordimer, Edith Wharton, James Thurber, Anthony Trollope, Isak Dinesen, Evelyn Waugh, and Naguib Mahfouz. This book was in my Christmas stocking, and in its diversity, sensitivity, and plain good writing, it made me a very happy man. More, Ms. Slung, more!