THIS DICK IS A JANE

By John Skow

Perils lurk for the male thriller writer giddy enough to cast a woman as the hero of a biff-bam adventure series. Just how hard can she bop the bad guys without coming off as an ape in drag? And how much can she fiddle with makeup or fret over runny panty hose before a reader of either sex decides that yeah, yeah, too much verisimilitude is unreal?

Novelist Thomas Perry's answers (which seem to be, respectively, "quite hard" and "not much") have carried him handily through three highly readable if not altogether believable episodes in the career of Jane Whitefield, a lone operative of stunning beauty and bone-crushing martial-arts skills. She is half Seneca Indian and half Irish American, and her useful talent is to function as a very unofficial one-woman witness-relocation program, helping people disappear into new identities when the forces of evil are about to pounce. She thinks of herself as "a guide," and she most often guides with brainpower, computer savvy, a delightfully devious nature and a library of false identities, fleshed out with features like credit histories, that she has built up for herself and possible clients over the years. Now and then the spirit world sends a clue in a dream that villains are closing in, and Whitefield snoozes attentively.

But when brute force is called for, she's ready. Early in her latest adventure, Shadow Woman (Random House; 350 pages; $22), a thug traps her in an elevator at a Las Vegas casino. She feigns ineffectuality, cringes, then breaks his leg and gouges an eye. As she starts to leave, he grabs her ankle hard (his grip "tightening like the jaws of an animal"), and she says to him, "Think. If you drag me back in there alone with you and your broken leg, are things going to get better for you, or worse?" Sweet reason prevails, and he lets go.

In her first adventure, Vanishing Act (1995), Whitefield sleeps with the villain, supposing him to be the good guy. In the current novel, however, Whitefield does the unthinkable: she marries a nice, decent doctor she has known for years. He's real, not a villain, but suddenly he is the target of a female hit person who uses nakedness as deep disguise. Will he, won't she?

"They warned me," says author Perry, who lives in Studio City, Calif., with his wife, scriptwriter Jo Perry, and their two small children. "Friends said, 'Don't let Jane get married, or she'll maybe even, you know, have a baby.'" Perry, who is white, was reared in Tonawanda, in upstate New York, in what is still to some extent Seneca country. Making Whitefield a cross-cultural Seneca (novelist Tony Hillerman's Navajo cop Jim Chee, for instance, seems more thoroughly Indian) gave Perry an opportunity to learn more about the local Native American culture. And making her a woman "let me see whether I could write about 51% of the population." He has nearly finished another Whitefield novel, he says, and has three more to go on a contract with his publisher. "Then," he says, "Random House will release my children."

--By John Skow