The New Whodunits

THE HIDDEN GRAVE, by Peter Hardin (217 pp.; Harper: $2.75), is the story of Gideon, a fortyish, "handsome granite man, huge, subtly balanced." He has cold grey eyes and cropped grey curls. Men bristle with an atavistic hate in his presence, but women lust after him. Why has Gideon come back to a place he has avoided for 20 years? What is the fascinating secret of Helen, now one of the town's leading citizens, who once loved him unreservedly? Why do the hotelkeeper, the banker and the lawyer first fawn upon him, then try to threaten and bully him out of town? Since this is a "novel of suspense," such questions inevitably come up but are left simmering until the final chapters. Meanwhile, the fictional characters can be kept scurrying through all manner of apparently unmotivated but obviously hazardous activities.

The formula is a sound one, but Author Hardin has taken out some extra insurance. He makes good use of a theme currently popular with "serious" novelists, i.e., Aging Man Returns to Home Town in Search of His Youth. On top of that, he manages to combine outstandingly successful plots from both sides of the Atlantic, i.e., the British whodunit's Murder Stalks a Village and the American thriller's Sleuth Outwits Corrupt Local Politicians.

TOUR DE FORCE, by Christianna Brand (272 pp.; Scribner; $2.75), might be regarded as a superior mystery if it had been written by a newcomer, but from the author of Fog of Doubt it is disappointing. This time Author Brand blithely switches the point of view from chapter to chapter, for no apparent reason. The payoff to her mystery, furthermore, is a disastrously frayed cliche. But the Brand strength lies in a vivid setting and amusing characters. Her setting in this case--an independent kingdom on an island in the Mediterranean--is as believable and as funny as something invented by the early Evelyn Waugh. Her mixed bag of English people on a conducted tour includes an aging Scotland Yard inspector, a frightened spinster, a fluttery male dressmaker, a seductive female novelist. They can all be remembered for several days after the book is finished--a neat trick for a whodunit.

HELL IS A CITY, by William Ard (246 pp.; Rinehart; $2.75), features Timothy Dane, one of the more entertaining and intelligent private eyes, but the real issue is good cops v. bad cops. An expert at big-city political shenanigans, Author Ard is also expert at compact plotting and at dragging readers on a breakneck chase.

MURDER IN JACKSON HOLE, by Maude Parker (243 pp.; Rinehart; $2.75), has the virtue of an unusual setting: a dude ranch in Wyoming. However, there is one trouble with leaving a really despicable intended victim too long on the scene: the reader rather hates to see a murder rap pinned on any of the nice folks who are left.

THE WOMAN IN THE CASE, by Edgar Lustgarten (218 pp.; Scribner; $3), is a retelling--and also a brilliant explanation --of four famed British murder trials in which women figured prominently. A well-written account of a true crime has twice the chilling impact of fiction. Author Lustgarten, equipped with a sharp, legally trained mind and a novelist's eye and heart, is probably just the man to succeed William Roughhead and Edmund Pearson as top writer in the true-crime field.

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