The Higher Pantherism

By L.M.

AN AMERICAN VERDICT

by MICHAEL J.ARLEN

216 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

THE BRIAR PATCH

by MURRAY KEMPTON

282 pages. Dutton. $7.95.

Here are two of the nation's more stylish and intelligent white writers bringing back the Black Panthers for postmortems. Michael Arlen examines the 1969 raid in which 14 heavily armed Chicago plainclothesmen broke into a Panther headquarters and killed Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Murray Kempton recapitulates the trial of the 21 Panthers who allegedly conspired to murder policemen and blow up New York department stores. In each case, the author's sympathies are pointedly with the Panthers.

One mystery is why both books should be so disappointing. As a television watcher for The New Yorker during the worst of the Viet Nam War, Arlen wrote a mordantly brilliant series of essays that have been collected in The Living Room War. His second book was Exiles, a precise and lovely memoir of his parents. But An American Verdict seems oddly negligent.

Arlen's principal focus is the trial of State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan, who was accused -- and acquitted -- of conspiring to obstruct justice in inves tigating the facts of the police raid, in which the killings were presented as "self-defense." Arlen surrounds his tri al narrative with the atmospherics of Chicago. But it is mostly offhand, as if Arlen knows, as the reader knows, that Mike Royko has done Richard Daley better and Norman Mailer got Chica go down much better five years ago.

Murray Kempton is sometimes bril liant in his perceptions of the angry prides and prejudices and the different worlds that met in Justice John Murtagh's New York City courtroom. But The Briar Patch is weirdly overwritten. Kempton's high prose style often so veneers the drama that even the simple facts of the case become difficult to follow. The language sometimes seems a travesty of James or Gibbon undertaking to describe Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Kempton simultaneously affects engagement and disdainful detachment, and the result occasionally leaves him drifting over the events in a kind of rhetorical blimp, watching the ghetto through opera glasses.

Kempton attempts to heighten ev ery detail into the importance of gen eralized truth. "Michael Tabor," he writes of one defendant, "had an intensity that overrode mere precedents; by mere presence, now and then un abashedly malign, he enforced the illusion that the insulted had come to vengeance." The language is accurate enough in its grand way, but eventually the reader cares less about the defendants than about the author, gesticulating here and there in a peculiar kind of 18th century jive.

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