The Mysteries

NORTH FROM ROME, by Helen MacInnes (307 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), is a sentimental travelogue spiced with a warning to all impulsive tourists: mind your own business. Horning in on a 3 a.m. kidnaping on the Via Veneto makes a lovelorn Harvardman miss the boat to New York, involves him with assorted dope peddlers, spies, a Sicilian triggerman turned legitimate, an Italian aristocrat turned Communist, and a dark-eyed golden-skinned Roman girl who did a turn at Radcliffe. It all leaves him too jumpy to enjoy the landscape between Rome and Perugia, or even the pleasures of an assignation near the Borghese Gardens. With the warning comes a promise. It seems that if the tourist has enough wit to duck when the guns go off, and enough patience to wait for the professional counterspies to bumble through, he will win his girl and go home a hero. At least he does when a competent author organizes a bestselling suspense story.

THE BLONDE IN BLACK, by Ben Benson (224 pp.; Morrow; $2.95), suggests what too many mystery writers have forgotten: murders sometimes merit sympathy; the police deserve credit for some sense. When Detective Wade Paris investigates a killing at the home of Singer Junie Jacques, he does his job so thoroughly that he winds up with a well-documented story of how a recording star is made. Everything falls into place. The greasy-haired idol of the sloppy-soxers gets into the book for good reason; the sex is there for more than the leers. Even the lunatic brother in the barred room upstairs finally makes sense.

TRIGGER MORTIS, by Frank Kane (251 pp.; Rinehart; $2.95), starts shooting up the seamier side of Manhattan long before anyone thinks of calling the cops. Johnny Liddell, one of the hardest private eyes in town, takes on ex-pugs, Harlem hopheads, dance-hall dolls, a poverty-row pressagent and the alcoholic editorial staff of a scandal magazine in a two-fisted attempt to keep a client from being reminded of her days as a dancer at stag smokers. It proves only that when a girl gets into trouble there is always a good man around to get her out, provided she has copper-colored hair and the kind of construction that puts a lovelight in a private eye.

THE MAN WITH YELLOW SHOES, by Anthony Heckstall-Smith (238 pp.; Roy; $2.75), is a modest memorial to a lonely soul: a middle-aged English bachelor with a little money, a lot of time and a proper sense of duty. Richard Forrest had no good reason for visiting Cairo just before Nasser grabbed the canal, and no sensible explanation for staying on. But after a casual acquaintance was murdered there, what else could a chap do? Not hard-case Communists, unregenerate Nazis or fanatical Arabs of the Brotherhood of Mohammed can stay this fast-moving story. Nor can they keep a muddling middle-class Englishman from winning one last victory in the Middle East.

THE LONG SKELETON, by Frances & Richard Lockridge (190 pp.; Lippincott; $2.95), takes off from the logical assumption that when a Torquemada-type TV interviewer is poisoned, the list of suspects is likely to run into considerable space. The puzzle yields to Pamela North, a young lady who has already solved a lively libraryful of murders. But her devotion to her sensitive-stomached Siamese cat and her giddy insistence that violence can be cute suggest that, for all her prowess as a detective, Mrs. North has a promising future as a likely victim.

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