To Be or Not to Be

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In popular myth the conflict between a writer's literary aspirations and the coarser demands of the marketplace besets only the "serious" author. Novelists who turn out the mystery, thriller, police or spy story are presumed to have long since made their peace with the printer's devil. In fact, however, the ranks of crime writers are as beleaguered as any other by the need for compromise. The battle rarely focuses on setting, which may be urban or rural, domestic or foreign, modern or ancient, or on subject matter, for which these days the rule seems to be the kinkier the better. The clash comes instead over format. Most writers seem to prefer one-shot stories, as full of catharsis as a classic tragedy, while publishers -- and readers -- clamor for series in which a likable, marketable character appears again and again. The series hero offers predictable pleasures, and some outstanding examples -- Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe -- attract faithful followers who are not otherwise fans of the mystery form. For writers, however, the series format imposes so many constraints that they may feel they are writing the same book over and over. Small wonder that Conan Doyle sent Holmes plummeting over the Reichenbach Falls, only to have to give in and magically bring him back.

By whatever means, the vast majority of crime writers reconcile themselves to return engagements. Thus despite the dangers, or at least doldrums, of repetition, series account for most of the current crop of top crime fiction. Perhaps the most impressive cumulative performance comes from Sir John Appleby, the fictional retired head of Scotland Yard and the signature detective of Michael Innes, a.k.a. J.I.M. Stewart, 80, a retired Oxford don who has been crafting wry, sprightly, often fanciful mysteries for more than half a century. The "ex-bobby," as he coyly calls himself, reappears in an umpteenth adventure, Appleby and the Ospreys (Dodd Mead; 185 pages; $15.95), to investigate the murder of a dotty peer struck down in the library of his ancestral country pile. There is not much out of the ordinary in either the premise or the solution, but Innes' plot prestidigitation is as deft as ever, and his celebrated sense of humor is in full flood, whether sketching a social-climbing mother or recounting a literal manifestation of bats in the belfry of a parish church.

Another remarkable record of consistency has been notched by Edith Pargeter, a prolific British writer and translator (of Czech poetry, among other pursuits). Under the nom de crime Ellis Peters she has produced The Rose Rent (Morrow; 190 pages; $15.95), her 13th highly evocative novel about Brother Cadfael, a 12th century monk in the abbey town of Shrewsbury. Like his 20th century soulmate, Father Brown of the G.K. Chesterton stories, Cadfael attractively suggests that the highest act of faith is the use of reason. Robert Barnard, whose mordantly funny one-off mysteries are as good as any currently being produced, has tended to sag in the too cute series featuring Perry Trethowan, a highborn cop. In Cherry Blossom Corpse (Scribners; 213 pages; $14.95), Barnard is back at his malicious best. Perry accompanies his sister to a convention of romance novelists where, literarily speaking at * least, murder is the least of the crimes on display.

Martha Grimes, an American who uses village Britain as her setting and actual pub names as her titles, fell off in recent books but seems reinvigorated in her ninth, The Five Bells and Bladebone (Little, Brown; 299 pages; $15.95). It blends almost Dickensian sketches of character and social class with glimpses of a ferocious marriage. For the first time in several volumes she makes effective use of her oddball detecting team: Policeman Richard Jury, a product of an orphanage, and Nobleman Melrose Plant, a snob who repudiated his lordly titles as unnecessary.

In addition to a central character or clique, one of the recurring enticements of a series is the locale. In British mysteries it tends to be an imaginary village. Among Americans, especially hard-boiled writers, it is usually an all too realistic big city. Michael Collins sets his tales about Dan Fortune, a one-armed private eye, in seedy Manhattan. Minnesota Strip (Fine; 253 pages; $17.95) is named for the Tenderloin, where out-of-towners end up as hookers or worse. Collins' politically inflamed narrative is meant to point up the victimization in what are often called victimless crimes. Loren D. Estleman ranks behind Elmore Leonard in fame but not in quality as Detroit's other macho laureate. One of his series characters is a hired killer; the other a prematurely world-weary private eye made skeptical by Viet Nam and cynical by coming home. In Lady Yesterday (Houghton Mifflin; 194 pages; $15.95), the private eye is hired to dig into the pasts of two women, with bloody results. What makes the book special is the riffs about Detroit, particularly a passage set in a jazz club that traces the city's ethnic history in its music.

Ed McBain's series about struggling Criminal Lawyer Matthew Hope has a Florida backdrop and aptly reflects the go-go, money-chasing mentality of both white-collar types and lowlifes in boom areas. Puss in Boots (Henry Holt; 248 pages; $15.95) saddles Hope with an innocent client accused of murder who won't tell the truth because he still hopes to bring off a derailed scam. Jonathan Kellerman's detective Alex Delaware is a clinical psychologist in Southern California. In the highly literate Over the Edge (Atheneum; 373 pages; $17.95), Delaware comes to the rescue of a former client, an adolescent genius who is now the apparent perpetrator of a string of savage homosexual murders. Harold Adams takes the genre back to the small-town suppressed anger of James M. Cain. The Barbed Wire Noose (Mysterious Press; 184 pages; $15.95) is a thoroughly nasty and fascinating study of hatreds between three sets of fathers and sons, including Detective Carl Wilcox, a roughneck ex-con in South Dakota during the Depression.

For unlikeliness of setting the prize must go to a series debut by TIME Associate Editor J.D. Reed and his wife Christine Reed that persuasively celebrates the unsung geographical diversity in, of all places, New Jersey. Exposure (Soho; 242 pages; $14.95) is also noteworthy for a new and plausible motive for multiple murder -- an American soccer player's private war against the foreign stars dominating a U.S. pro league -- and for its hero, no two- fisted drinker but an alcoholic news photographer trying to beat the booze whose lady friend is not some admiring poppet but a ripe, matronly psychiatrist.

The spy novel does not lend itself so readily to sequels: the plots are more apocalyptic, and even if the characters survive, their undercover effectiveness usually does not. But just as John le Carre managed to bring back dumpy, deceptively bland George Smiley, so Brian Freemantle has managed to write six captivating novels featuring scruffy, wily Charlie Muffin. He is a brilliant survivor who in his time has outwitted the Soviets, the Chinese, the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia and his own British service, which early in his debut novel set him up to be killed. In See Charlie Run (Bantam; 278 pages; $15.95), Muffin is back managing a defection that almost no one wants to see succeed. Alas, it is harder to imagine a return of the investigative journalist who digs through the smoldering ashes of two-decades-old news in David Quammen's The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Doubleday; 350 pages; $17.95). The story is built on three staples of spy fiction: the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald spent time in the Soviet Union and must have had contact with the KGB; the inability of the CIA, whenever confronted with a Soviet defector, to know whether he is a font of information or a plant aimed at disinformation; and the too often paralyzing fear among senior spooks that a highly placed "mole" has compromised everything. Quammen traverses this established terrain with skill, deftly interweaving plots, achingly conveying the ordeal of a "hostile debriefing." A retired spymaster at the center of the story remarks that "history is the control of appearances." Quammen stirs readers to care about the truth behind the truth behind the truth.

Despite the abundance of worthy series, one proof that writers are wise to resist them is that the two best current entries in any category are one-offs. Both are from British writers better noted for their series featuring pairs of mismatched policemen. Reginald Hill, whose stories of the cops Dalziel and Pascoe verge on instant classics, writes Death of a Dormouse (Mysterious Press; 281 pages; $15.95) under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell. He discerningly depicts the slow emergence from submission to self-respect of a woman who discovers after her husband's death how little she has known of his real life. Ruth Rendell, roughly half of whose novels feature Detectives Wexford and Burden, won an Edgar this spring under the pseudonym Barbara Vine for the one- off saga of family madness A Dark-Adapted Eye. She may be a contender for another under her own name for Heartstones (Harper & Row; 80 pages; $10.95), a medieval enameled miniature of a novella. Set in the environs of a cathedral, it etches the opposite but equally crazy ways in which two sisters react to their mother's death and their father's potential remarriage. An explicit tribute to the quasi-supernatural stories of Henry James and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Heartstones also makes full use of Rendell's own trademark chill, a slide-under-the-microsc ope dispassion that permits all sorts of behavior but forgives nothing. No other living mystery writer complains more openly about the burden of fans expecting her to bring back series characters when she has other pursuits in mind. In A Dark-Adapted Eye and Heartstones, Rendell does what Conan Doyle never could: proves she has something far greater to offer.