Four old reliables lead the July list,...

Four old reliables lead the July list, with varying degrees of reliability.

The ferociously prolific Ed McBain, who by my count has so far written 28 of the 87th Precinct novels, is also extending another series, about a middle-age Florida lawyer named Matthew Hope. The House That Jack Built (they are all named for nursery rhymes) is the eighth of the Hope stories.

McBain’s frenetic style can be off-putting.

One-line paragraphs.

Two words.

One.

Pace-setting.

Page-consuming.

But McBain is first and finally a storyteller, and when he sets his tale to wagging, he commands close attention. This time a solid, stolid Midwest farmer comes to Calusa to visit the brother whose gay life style he has been reluctantly financing. There is a loud quarrel; the gay brother is killed, and the visiting brother becomes the principal suspect and Hope’s client.

There prove to be extortionists in the picture, a pregnant waif who claims to be the abandoned child of the superrich local brewery family, reports of a figure in black fleeing the murder house in the rainy night. At last there is a startlingly different shoot-out amidst the bubbling vats of the brewery.

McBain’s telegraphic style gives his story a hard, reportorial surface. Characters are caught in a few memorable strokes; things happen economically. What is surprising in such terse circumstances is how much you have felt, or have been led to understand that the characters were feeling. His portrait of the gay life is not flattering, although his straights are not so wonderful either.

He has written at least 18 other non-series novels under the McBain name and “Strangers When We Meet” as Evan Hunter. Amazing.

Since “The Anderson Tapes” nearly 20 years ago, Lawrence Sanders has been prolific himself, averaging a book a year (19 to date) and working his way through the deadly sins and several of the livelier commandments. Now he has a series character in Timothy Cone, a rumpled and untidy financial investigator for a firm that specializes in the discreet probing of Wall Street mischiefs.

“The Timothy Files” was his previous outing. Now, in Timothy’s Game, Cone is the link between two unrelated capers, one involving insider trading by Mafia types, the other an attempt by outsiders to muscle in on a small but prosperous Chinese food company run by an adroit and wily old Chinese gentleman who also has an adulterous wife and a treasonable son to worry about.

Cone, who on paper suggests Orson Welles in “Touch of Evil,” is an example of the currently popular breed of crime protagonist, slovenly but smart, who improbably commands the love of a terrific dame and just as improbably gets the job done.

Sanders is a pro who does his research to make the milieu interesting in its own terms, as the Wall Street stuff is, and who makes the talk and the action continuous, even in the two discontinuous adventures here.

Crimson Joy is the 15th of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, and there are signs of fatigue, or of the formula elements becoming a kind of well-padded straitjacket. The good sex with Susan and the good food with everybody or nobody have begun to draw attention to the banality of the surrounding material.

Somebody has been killing black women and leaving a rose as a trade mark. It may be a cop, which is why Spenser is brought in by the police to be a disinterested sleuth. The killer may also be a client of psychiatrist Susan, which generates suspense and the final excitements.

But the serial killer as a fictional ploy has, it is tempting to say, been done to death, especially when he seems as much a mother-hating stereotype as this one.

Julian Symons is a venerable British historian of crime fiction who has himself written some fine and intricate mysteries, including “The Plot Against Roger Rider” and “The Man Who Killed Himself.” The Kentish Manor Murders, his new one, takes its title from what purports to be a lately discovered, unfinished Sherlock Holmes novel in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own handwriting.

Symons’ character, an actor named Sheridan Haynes famed for his portrayals of Holmes (but not apparently for much else), is hired to give a one-man show for a one-man audience, an eccentric American millionaire and Holmes collector who lives in what he calls Castle Baskerville on the moors. Haynes becomes a skeptical and reluctant link between the ailing collector and the dubious European type who is peddling the manuscript.

Haynes is always sure that the manuscript is a forgery, if only because Sir Arthur never used the word “murder” in a title. Unfortunately, the entire proceeding is so forced and artificial and Symons’ light-hearted attempts to meld Holmes and Eric Ambler (or Graham Greene) so unavailing that the story’s major action, crammed into the last handful of pages, arrives a bit too late to save the day. Disappointing, my dear Watson.

Cut Numbers is a first mystery by Nick Tosches, who previously made his reputation as a free-style chronicler of the rock scene, as in “Hellfire,” his biography of Jerry Lee Lewis. He is far from rock here and deep into “Prizzi’s Honor” country, his principal figure a small-time Brooklyn loan shark named Louie Brunnellesches, who isn’t making it since he is too soft-hearted to lean on his wretched clients when they welsh.

Louie’s 85-year-old uncle has been a figure in the numbers racket, and he has a new scheme. The scheme is not as straightforwardly crooked as it seems and is central to a beautifully intricate plot of greed, revenge and the gory mayhem consequent to thieves falling out.

Tosches’ prose is occasionally overwrought. “The possibilities of errant fate beguiled and haunted him, and he sometimes became lost in them, like the blond waves and ambivalent flesh of Donna Lou, like ghostly sighs of light from long ago, aswirl in the morning motes.”

Yet after the flat and phony side-of-the-mouth toughness of much crime writing, it is a pleasure to read an author who is trying for freshness, originality and aptness of thought and feeling--and succeeding far more often than not. “Cut Numbers” is an elegant, entertaining and illuminating debut.

Tosches takes us into a world of mean, small-time crime that he seems to have observed at close hand.

Marcia Biederman in Post No Bonds takes us into the world of bail-bondsmen (and a bail-bondswoman) that she appears to know well or to have studied thoroughly.

A middle-age housewife named Grace takes over her husband’s bond business, gets stuck when a big, big client disappears and takes off to fetch him back. His sexy girlfriend joins her, and the two women make a right adventurous pair. The dialogue is wonderful, salty without approaching the gross, as they say, and Biederman, whose second mystery this is, is a welcome discovery. “Post No Bonds” is billed as the first of a series, so Grace will be back.

The truly traditional English mystery is harder and harder to come by. But Goodbye, Nanny Gray is one. Susannah Stacey is the nom-de-crime of two English writers, Jill Staynes and Margaret Storey, according to the copyright.

They have created a tidy, country village mystery about the murder of a nanny who was not quite as beloved as nannies are meant to be. A nasty piece of work, in fact, so it’s not surprising how many of the neighbors had motives for doing her in.

Money in the form of an inheritance is at the root of it; it often is. The characters include a rock star, a family of rich Arabs and one of impoverished nobility and divers others. The denouement is a mild but tricky surprise.

Teri White’s Fault Lines is quite inevitably set in Southern California, which has innumerable faults. White’s hard-edged tale involves a series of collisions, between a recovering ex-cop living in retirement in Topanga and an ex-con in search of an old girlfriend, and between the two of them with another pair of ex-cons and all of them with the old girlfriend.

A big stash of money is the grail this time, and what a bloody trail is created before it turns up in a triple-switch ending (if I counted right).

You have the feeling the author watched “Raging Bull” or “Scarface” too many times. The eff word is used more often than “the,” with a point of diminishing returns reached early on. It loses its power to suggest the toughness the author has in mind, and by drawing attention to itself detracts from the kind of tough story Hammett et al achieved with language you could use in Sunday school.

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT

by Ed McBain (Henry Holt: $16.95; 248 pp.) TIMOTHY’S GAME

by Lawrence Sanders (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $18.95; 384 pp.) CRIMSON JOY

by Robert B. Parker (Delacorte: $16.95; 224 pp.) THE KENTISH MANOR MURDERS

by Julian Symons (Viking: $15.95; 186 pp.) CUT NUMBERS

by Nick Tosches (Harmony Books: $17.95, 224 pp.) POST NO BONDS

by Marcia Biederman (Scribner’s: $14.95; 240 pp.) GOODBYE, NANNY GRAY

by Susannah Stacey (Summit: $16.95; 160 pp.) FAULT LINES

by Teri White (Mysterious Press: $16.95; 240 pp.)