Books: Mysteries That Bloom in Spring

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Certainly the congress delegates —from the U.S., Britain, Canada, Denmark, Portugal, Israel, Sweden, Italy and Japan—bore no marks of second-class citizenship. "We're all survivors," said one jolly fellow who has dispatched, at last count, 332 odds and sods. They are a joky, well-tailored squad who, amazingly, carry no stilettos for their fellow authors. Some of the most famed and envied than-atologists are, of course, very rich: Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert Ludlum, Fred Dannay (a.k.a. Ellery Queen) and Ellin, among others. Britain's artful Desmond Bagley, who has yet to make much of an imprint on the U.S. audience, still clears $250,000 a year.

More than ever, to the benefit of their checkbooks and their readers, crime and mystery writers work at other professions. Britain's Don Rumbelow (The Complete Jack the Ripper) is a London bobby; Los Angeles Cop Joe Wambaugh only recently quit the force. In the tradition of Erie Stanley Gardner, many are lawyers, notably Harold Q. Masur (Bury Me Deep), Francis ("Mike") Nevins Jr. (Publish and Perish), Joe Hensley (A Killing in Gold), and, of course, Englishman Michael Gilbert, creator of the Patrick Petrella series and, be it noted, the author of Raymond Chandler's will. The remarkable P.D. James has a full-time job in the criminal division of Britain's Home Office. Other practitioners also work as journalists, critics, doctors and even perhaps as agents of the nonliterary kind.

One writer has perforce abandoned a well-learned profession for the typewriter. Kojak-bald Al Nussbaum, 44, was on the FBI's Most Wanted list in 1962; convicted on seven charges of bank robbery (he won't say how many other jobs he pulled), Nussbaum served 14 years in federal pens where he became a prolific and successful crime writer, mostly for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. He now turns out screeds under his own name, which is German for nut tree, as well as Alberto Avellano and A.F. Oreshnik, which have similar meanings in, respectively, Spanish and Russian. E. Richard Johnson is another con, whose fine first novel, Silver Street, won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar award in 1968. Johnson, alas, is back in the slammer: a slight case of armed robbery.

The successful crime-mystery-suspense novel today, unlike a great deal of current fiction, must be skillfully plotted around a cast of credible, disparate, motivated characters; it almost invariably entails expert knowledge of a milieu or a profession; and it depends heavily on the author's familiarity with locale, which can range from the Arctic to the Sahara, Manhattan to the Mojave. Moreover, as Brian Garfield (Death Wish) argues in I, Witness, "the literature of crime and suspense can provoke images and questions of the most complex intellectual and emotional force; it can explore the most critical of ethical and behavioral dilemmas." As C. Day Lewis—who was once Britain's poet laureate and, as Nicholas Blake, a canny suspense writer (The Beast Must Die)—put it, the mystery story is "the folk myth of the 20th century."

The ten current and compelling exemplars: