Criminal Pursuits

When Donald E. Westlake’s epic African caper novel, KAHAWA (Mysterious Press: $21.95; 477 pp.) made its original appearance in 1982, it was nominated for an Edgar but died on the shelves for want of a decent push by its then-publisher. This was astonishing because the work is a masterpiece by one of the best crime writers in the business. It is ceaselessly inventive, suspenseful across a span of nearly 500 pages, sexy, exotic, muscular, angry, horrific, a unique blend of reportage and imagination. No wonder that the book is now being reissued, with appropriate fanfares, drum rolls and a new introduction by the author.

It began as a true story. A friend told Westlake about some mercenaries in the Uganda of Idi Amin Dada in the 1970s who stole a mile-long freight train full of coffee--and made it disappear. Some of Westlake’s characters once stole a bank (in “Bank Shot”). The idea of purloining a whole train had to be irresistible.

Westlake did masses of research but got no closer to Uganda itself than the Kenyan shores of Lake Victoria (which figures importantly in the plot). Amin had been in exile only three years, and Uganda was still in a state of unrest.

In Westlake’s marvelous telling, the train caper is in the hands of two American mercenaries and the pilot-girlfriend of one of them. (The spirits of the young Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Myrna Loy can be felt hovering over this feisty trio.) A vast cast of characters also includes a shrewdly villainous, double- and triple-dealing white aide to the dictator, an English diplomat representing international coffee interests, an ancient Swiss financier with an eye on the coffee (which Amin is exporting to get some desperately needed hard currency), a seductive female spy in Amin’s employ, some Asian merchants expelled from Uganda by Amin and living in Kenya who have plans of their own for the coffee.

Dominating everything like a menacing cloud is Amin himself, giggling, unpredictable and lethal.

Caper books, like caper films, may borrow a context of real time and place, but the caper itself--the coffee or Hitchcock’s McGuffin--is at last, usually, all that really matters. It’s different this time. Westlake was obviously so appalled by the genocidal ferocity of Amin’s rule and the plight of his enemies of several races and colors, that a passionate anger drives his story no less than the plot to divert and hide the train. And the resonances of the anger do not die away with the raucous ending (which is somehow 007 and “Mission Impossible” roaring together).

Westlake is now and again funny, as he frequently is--here most often in the banterings among the mercenary trio. But just as often he is a kind of docudramatist, leading the reader into the dark, suffocating, verminous horror of the torture and detention cells beneath the benignly pink State Research Bureau, the actual HQ of Amin’s secret police.

The train caper itself is beautifully detailed, as fascinating to watch as all work. Not least, Westlake is a whiz at sheer narrative writing, with a fine ability to make you see. The denouement is at last good and satisfying fun, with some late plot twists and ess-curves in the proceedings. Yet the reality quotient lingers, as in some of the thriller novels of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

As a drama critic and occasional contributor to the Times, Dick Lochte is closely identified with Los Angeles. But he was in fact born and raised in New Orleans. In THE NEON SMILE (Simon & Schuster: $21; 304 pp.) he returns for the second time (after “Blue Bayou”) to New Orleans and captures it to the last levee-side beignet at dawn.

It is, in fact, an ingeniously structured and plotted novel in which opening and closing segments of present time bracket a very long flashback (34 chapters long) recreating events surrounding the 1965 death of a militant black leader, apparently a suicide in his jail cell.

Lochte’s hero, a young private eye named Terry Manion, is hired to research the 30-year-old case for a true crime television series. Manion is interested because the ex-cop who was his mentor had investigated the case. The mentor had also tracked down and shot the serial killer called the Meddler, who decorated his corpses with voodoo dolls.

In Lochte’s novel as in much crime fiction, the past will not lay quiet nor the dead stay buried. The more Manion probes, the more backlash he gets. The plot is amazingly convoluted, winding at last high into Louisiana politics. It is no small achievement to have kept the goings-on both clear and exciting.

Lochte sketches a large number of vivid characters, embittered old cops, cynical young cops, a bright child, men and women out of the dead militant’s past, even an artist in neon with something to hide.

New Orleans now rivals Miami, Manhattan and Los Angeles as an epicenter for crime fiction and Lochte has become one of its prime delineators.

Bill Blum is an administrative law judge in Los Angeles, making his debut as a novelist with PREJUDICIAL ERROR (Dutton: $21.95; 289 pp.). The ingredients are familiar enough. John Solomon, once a hotshot assistant district attorney, was bounced out of office on a morals charge and has been taking refuge inside a whiskey bottle. His old nemesis, now running for district attorney, rewards him with a no-win assignment, to defend a lowlife who killed a cop during a drug bust.

It looks like a fast trip to permanent humiliation. But then it begins to seem the killer may have been set up; indeed there may be a big and odorous back story. There is indeed, and Solomon, who finally cuts his boozing down if not out, uncovers it with the help of his investigating partner Stretch.

Blum’s writing is steady rather than exciting, and Solomon’s move from despair to determination and relative sobriety seems almost to happen between chapters rather than in front of the reader. But Blum obviously knows the territory, and his second effort is likely to be more sure-handed.

Frances Fyfield is in effect an assistant district attorney, London-style (an attorney in the Crown Prosecution Office). She has written previously about Helen West, a crown prosecutor, in last year’s excellent “Perfectly Pure and Good,” and now in A CLEAR CONSCIENCE (Pantheon: $20; 224 pp.)

She also writes as Frances Hegarty (“Half Light”), and in either voice she gets deeply into the psyches of her protagonists. She is less well-known than Ruth Rendell, but it is with Rendell that she invites admiring comparison.

The theme of the new work is abused wives and the seemingly unanswerable question of why they stay with their abusers. West can hardly imagine being married, although she has a semi-steady lover, a policeman. She certainly cannot conceive of her cleaning woman Cath’s devotion to the man who leaves her brutally bruised except where the bruises won’t show.

Fyfield’s portrait of Cath’s relationship with Joe is appalling in its violence but, in the end, the rage is not wholly inexplicable after all. Cath’s murdered brother Damien is a sort of ongoing presence, the reality of their hard childhood together emerges slowly.

The author writes, as it were, in extreme close-up; the vision, never wide, is from a character’s point of view. But settings become extraordinarily real: the bar where Cath’s man Joe works, the other family Cath cleans for, even the office workers West can see from her window.

Yet almost surreptitiously, almost by sleight of hand, Fyfield is creating a very intricate and surprise-filled plot. There is the matter of the sharpened bayonets, a confusion of them. The shocks in the story continue after you’d have said there surely can be none left (a Rendell specialty). West is left, in fact, with more moral ambiguities than even she realizes.

Fyfield is a wonder, and in West she has created a modern woman in whom the love of independence is a sometimes painful desideratum.

Colin Dexter is also a wonder, and his Inspector Morse series (now 11 titles long) rolls along with a vigor and high style that shows no sign of flagging or flattening. As before, Morse abuses and cadges drinks off his aide, the long-suffering Sgt. Lewis, drinks too much, is susceptible to but never quite overcome by pretty ladies, does crossword puzzles, refused to yield his first name and solves crimes because his hunches are right more often than not.

In THE DAUGHTERS OF CAIN (Crown: $21; 295 pp.), an elderly Oxford don has been stabbed. A dismissed college servant is a likely suspect. But even more than usual Dexter has compiled a bizarre set of characters, including a dying schoolteacher, a young hooker and the suspect’s wife. The suspect himself disappears, only to emerge in the river, swathed in plastic bags, rolled in a rug and quite thoroughly dead with an ornamental knife in his back.

The mystery is not least a timetable matter, very cleverly constructed. But as clever as the mystery is, the deep satisfaction of Dexter’s work is that, as a teacher of classics and setter of exams before he turned to crime fiction, Dexter writes with an urbanity and a range of reference that is all his own. His chapter headings are borrowed from sources as various as Aristotle and Dorothy Parker as well as Anon., and no other mysterian I can think of would include in his text a lewd and lively updated translation of some lines from Catullus.