CRIMINAL PURSUITS

New voices are as vital to crime fiction as to pop music, and two strong new voices enliven this month’s offerings. Paul Lindsay is or has been an FBI agent. He writes about the bureau from the inside in Witness to the Truth (Random House: $20; 312 pp.), creating a likable damn-the-rules hero in agent Mike Devlin and a whole set of truly detestable higher-ups, status-fixated or toadying, depending on their rank.

Lindsay’s novel, his first, has already been bought for the movies. No wonder: It carries the aura of an author’s score-settling angers, a salty tang of authenticity, continuous action and suspense and a good deal of street humor. Devlin copes with drug dealers, a mole who is going to sell a list of the bureau’s informants to the underworld, the kidnaping of an agent’s daughter and the maddening obstinacy of bureaucrats who would rather stifle a maverick than fight crime.

“There were three things agents were taught never to question,� Lindsay writes: “That Dillinger shot first, J. Edgar Hoover’s heterosexuality, and Riley Smith’s loyalty,� Smith in the novel being an agent who had been as rudely treated as Devlin but who, like Devlin, found that the idealism that made him an agent could not be killed by inferior leaders.

The setting is Detroit, made to sound ever so slightly like Beirut. A first-rate debut.

Patricia McFall, now a university writing teacher in Orange County, lived in Japan for a year and has used the experience as background for her first novel, Night Butterfly (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 277 pp.). Her heroine, Nora James, a tall, beautiful American blonde, is studying linguistics in Tokyo and working nights as a hostess in a nightclub. The time is the 1970s, the country’s economic miracles well advanced but the shadows of war and war crimes not yet erased.

James’ adventures are right out of Ian Fleming, with something of the how’s-that-again? dazzle of early Len Deighton. She is kidnaped, drugged and swept off to the research complex of a mystery-shrouded businessman. She is befriended by a young journalist hoping to expose the tycoon’s ruthless ways. A publishing office is firebombed, betrayal is at every hand.

McFall captures the isolation of a stranger in a strange land, compounded here by Hitchcock’s frequent theme of the innocent immersed in events whose outlines only gradually come clear. She obviously knows the territory, language and rubrics, and her expertise, along with the attractiveness of her imperiled Ms. James, makes for another very promising debut.

Driving Force (Putnam’s: $21.95; 318 pp.) is by my count the 31st of Dick Francis’ racetrack novels, a succession that began with “Dead Cert� in 1962. The pattern is almost unvarying: events played through the perceptions (and frequently the excruciating pains) of a singular protagonist. The not inconsiderable miracle is that Francis keeps finding freshness in the formula, so that the new book conveys all the taut anxieties of the first.

Francis devises new heroes almost every time out. The man here is Freddie Croft, who operates a horse-transport service. Trouble begins when a hitchhiker (picked up against Croft policy) dies en route. Before it ends, Croft has been slugged, his house trashed, murder done, his business imperiled and startling revelations made about the uses to which the vans had been put without his knowledge. The Francis faithful (and indeed those who aren’t yet) will have little to complain of.

Michael Nava is a Los Angeles attorney writing a fourth novel about a gay Los Angeles attorney named Henry Rios. The Hidden Law (HarperCollins: $19; 193 pp.) is dedicated to Joseph Hansen, whose Dave Brandstetter was the first important gay protagonist in the mystery field.

Like Hansen’s series, now concluded, Nava’s books about Rios are marked by their candid but sympathetic portrayal of the life of a gay professional, the life complicated by being Hispanic in Los Angeles.

Rios, a recovering alcoholic, becomes involved in the murder of state senator Gus Pena. The prime suspect has disappeared into the barrio, and Rios, dubious about his guilt, has to find him.

At that, the efficient plot seems more than usually a carrier for the author’s larger concern, which is to convey Rios’ private anguish: his unresolved and angry estrangement from his domineering and unaccepting father, now dead; the breakup with a lover who has AIDS and who goes to a new lover, who also has AIDS; dealing with an abstract ideal of justice in an all too real environment.

The love scenes, considerably more explicit than the norm in either gay or straight commercial crime fiction, match with the candor of Nava’s vision, but may deter some readers from experiencing the novel’s larger theme of the universalities of love, loss and forgiveness.

Leonard Tourney’s Witness of Bones (St. Martin’s: $18.95; 262 pp.) is the seventh and quite possibly the best in his series about Matthew Stock, clothier and constable in Chelmsford late in the reign of Elizabeth I, and his sturdy wife Joan.

The Stocks are lured to London and embroiled in a plot against their friend (and the queen’s trusted aide) Sir Robert Cecil. At the heart of the plot is the bitter ecclesiastical struggle between the Protestants and the Papists, grown acute as Elizabeth lies dying.

Matthew is framed and imprisoned on a murder charge; Joan is kidnaped and put aboard a decaying boat bound for Calais but shipwrecked in a sudden storm. Stock, being blackmailed into denouncing Cecil, can do little but wait while the plot, engineered by an unidentified figure known only as “Your Grace� (hmm), sweeps toward a climax.

Tourney sets his period easily, with never a “Forsooth� or a “Zounds!� The intrigues are engrossing, and as always the Stocks are a wonderfully attractive pair. (Talk about family values.)

Humor is not really abundant in crime fiction, but one its able creators is Dallas Murphy, whose amiable hero Artie Deemer is supported by the earnings of his dog Jelly Roll, star of television commercials and a movie series that sounds like Rin Tin Tin with a sense of humor.

Deemer (and possibly the author) is something of a pool shark, and the present slight plot of Lush Life (Pocket Books: $20; 261 pp.) centers on a beauteous pool pro named Crystal Spivey. Complications, not quite mind-boggling, ensue, including a kidnaping and an assault on a Connecticut estate. Jelly Roll does not crack a safe or point a paw at the culprit, which is probably why the book is so merry and unforced.

Charles Wilson, a Mississippi writer, produced a fine and ingeniously plotted first novel called “Nightwatcher� (now in softcover). His second novel, Silent Witness (Carroll and Graf: $18.95; 304 pp.), is another uncommonly well plotted mystery that kicks off, so to speak, with the rape and murder of a young woman whose life, it appears after the fact, was very untidy.

The plot, indeed, is not tidily summarized either. Wilson’s man, Mark Ramsey, is asked by an old girlfriend, the wife of a principal suspect, to look into the case. Ramsey’s brother is the local chief of police (the setting is again the steamy South).

On the night of the murder, the death scene seems to have resembled the Interchange at rush hour. Sorting it all out involves a Christie-like set of conundrums, and the ending is ironic. Wilson’s writing is efficient rather than stylish; then again, so was Dame Agatha’s; the plotting was--is--what counts.

In the August Criminal Pursuits, I reviewed “a serious, mildly satiric and very expertly written novel� titled “Small Bang,� the work of an author pseudonymously called “Jack Fenno.� Critics were invited to guess Fenno’s true identity. With more amusement than deep conviction, I said Salman Rushdie. If you’re going to go for it, swing for the fences.

Well! as Jack Benny used to say. Fenno turns out to have been Hortense Calisher, 80, prolific author of novels, short stories and criticism, winner of an Academy of Arts & Letters award in 1967. Her Random House editor, Samuel Vaughan, explains that Calisher, trying what for her was a new genre, was curious to see how it would be received without regard to her existing literary reputation.