The best crime writing diverts and entertains...

The best crime writing diverts and entertains but it also catches the flavor of its time, and now and again the milieu is itself the message. So it is with Josef Skvorecky’s The End of Lieutenant Boruvka; translated by Paul Wilson (W. W. Norton: $18.95; 167 pp.), six connected stories featuring a homicide detective working in Prague in 1968, at the time of the Soviet “fraternal” occupation of the country.

It is the third collection of Boruvka stories and, to judge by the climactic events, the last. Josef Boruvka has had all he can take of the political corruption around and above him. He solves crimes--among them, the apparent suicide of a beautiful young woman, the shooting of another--only to have the guilty protected because of their political job or connections.

Skvorecky, whose other writings include “The Bass Saxophone” and “The Engineer of Human Souls,” evokes, with a terrible and mesmerizing immediacy, an oppressed and oppressive country with all its petty tyrannies, hypocrisies and insults to the soul. Read now against the recent freeings-up in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Skvorecky’s stories have the quality of prediction. He leaves no doubt that everything had to change, and in the lieutenant, Skvorecky has created a real, idiosyncratic and thoroughly likable protagonist, a rumpled and perfect symbol of the urgings for rebirth.

By my count, Vespers (William Morrow: $18.95; 331 pp.) is the 41st of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, set in a metropolis that is not quite New York or any other identifiable metropolis but linked to them all by the turbulence of its streets and the extremes of its life styles.

The first three in the series were published in 1956, but after more than 30 years at it (his output also including other novels published as Evan Hunter), McBain shows no sign of wearying or repeating himself. He is a muscular storyteller whose pace is relentless, dialogue crisp, detailings economic but telling, and who keeps finding fresh themes and sub-environments.

In “Vespers,” a young Catholic priest is stabbed to death at the door of the church. A cult of Satanists is headquartered not far away. (McBain gives more play-by-play on the Black Mass than the devout or the squeamish may care to read about; fair warning.)

There are some surprising links between church and anti-church in the story, and surprising, too, in its believable way, is the solution of the mystery of the priest’s death. McBain is not unsympathetic to his characters, and he can lead the reader’s sympathy exactly where he wants it to go. But his encompassing vision of life appears neither sunny nor optimistic, and the ending of “Vespers” is a very sardonic song at twilight.

Patricia Daniels Cornwell was a crime reporter on the Charlotte Observer who then became a computer analyst in the chief medical examiner’s office in Virginia. Her only previous book was a biography of Mrs. Billy Graham. For her first mystery, Postmortem (Scribner’s: $16.95; 293 pp.), she has created a protagonist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who is, conveniently enough, Virginia’s chief medical examiner.

The police are confronting a serial rapist, following a forensic trial in which the computer is massively involved. Cornwell trots out her expertise in dazzling and occasionally bewildering fashion. But the specifics are fascinating, as work well-described always is, whether it’s Dick Francis at the track or Amanda Cross on campus.

Dr. Scarpetta has a terrible time with the chauvinists around her, one of whom in particular is malevolently eager for her to fail. These passages have the ring of truth as experienced, and so does the portrait of an investigative reporter who abets the solving. (Cornwell has mastered the writer’s lesson of starting with what you know best.)

Remarkably, the novel is about the tracking down, not the culprit, who turns out to be as anonymous as a bus rider, even though he nearly adds Scarpetta to his scorecard. The story is based loosely on an actual serial killer in Richmond, and Scarpetta evidently has a real-life model in the medical examiner’s office. Whatever its inspirations, “Postmortem” is a first-rate first thriller, and I hope to run into Dr. Scarpetta again.

Edna Buchanan is another police reporter (for the Miami Herald, where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966) who has become a crime novelist. Nobody Lives Forever (Random House: $17.95; 241 pp.) is her second thriller (the first was “The Corpse Had a Familiar Face”).

She is nothing if not adventurous, and her villain is a woman with multiple personalities--an evil Eve. She is by turns a simpering child-woman, a raging and imaginative nymphomaniac, an uptight and obsessively clean housekeeper, a murderous male and, when she is reasonably in control, the mistress of a cop who is working on the various murders.

The cop is conveniently blind to his lady’s severe mood swings, although his buddy tumbles soon enough, thus enhancing the story’s quota of suspense. Writing through the consciousnesses of the various personae (who are dangerously jealous of each other, and, in every case but one, resentful of the detective), is no small trick. Buchanan makes it readable rather than convincing, but she generates a lot of suspense along the way and her plotting is nothing if not inventive.

At that, Buchanan is at her most readable when she is evoking today’s Miami, especially when a full moon has set all the weirdos a-hollering or when, in the blazing light of day, the great contrasts in a city with its own multiple and conflicted personalities are seen as through shimmering heat waves.

William Hood is said to have spent 30 years with various intelligence and counterintelligence agencies, including the OSS and its successor, the CIA. Reading Cry Spy (W. W. Norton: $18.95; 303 pp.), that claim is easy. Like the works of John Le Carre, his novel declares on every page that these must most indubitably be the tricks, the jargon, the endeavors of spy craft.

These are hard days for spies and spy-writers, with glasnost making gingerly neutrals of old adversaries and leaving an operative uncertain where his next squeal is coming from.

Hood’s man, the veteran Alan Trosper, introduced in “Spy Wednesday,” wants to discover why an old cloak-and-dagger pal, who had ostensibly come in safely from the cold, has been killed in England by a hard-to-detect poison favored by Moscow Central.

I suspect I’d have trouble passing a quiz on who had done what to whom on whose behalf. As in both Le Carre and Len Deighton, clarity is not a top priority and everyone speaks cryptically. The book, for all the ellipses, is considerably talkative, and yet there is a satisfactory quantity of action, a kidnaping and a forced confession or two among the pleasures. The mostly European settings and the characters, moles and countermoles as well as excessively mannered Washington higher-ups, are vividly captured (if that’s the word).

Bloody Sunday

The Man in the Moon (St. Martin’s: $16.95; 295 pp.) is a first cloth novel by Frank Norwood, a Los Angeles social worker and screenwriter. His hero is a half-Irish, Half-Hispanic bail-bondsman, raised in the East Los Angeles barrio, a sometime welterweight contender (still bearing scars from a fight with Marvelous Marvin Hagler) now in his late 30s. He lives in a dumpy flat near Venice.

The book’s interest is that it does have a feeling for the Los Angeles underside, not that Norwood is the first to discover it. The book’s problem is Norwood’s overwriting in emulation of Raymond Chandler and other stylists who kept or keep their images under fairly strict control. Plenty of complication and, after much action, a snowy shoot-out in the mountains of far-off Pennsylvania. A writer to watch for again, as he steadies his voice.