Books: Time to Murder and Create

Although the 1920s and 1930s are remembered as a golden age for mysteries, that era's exemplar, Agatha Christie, and most of her contemporaries had no gift for taking readers on a journey into another culture or milieu. The fun lay chiefly in guessing, if one cared, who killed Roger Ackroyd. Nowadays, Christie's kind of puzzle, based on clues larded into the text, has largely given way to a more novelistic brand of mystery, in which the solution may not matter that much to either the writer or the reader. The motive for a crime is more likely to be psychological than economic, and therefore the identity of the perpetrator is likely to loom up long before the last page. The detective has become an amiably flawed working stiff rather than a thinking machine. The final chapter is often devoted to the start of a romance for him or his client instead of the laborious untangling of a villain's scheme.

Most satisfying, the new mystery is often about some specific time or place or profession, whether it is Loren D. Estleman's seedy Detroit or William Marshall's nightmare vision of Hong Kong, Tony Hillerman's half-mystical, half-modern Navajo reservation or Jonathan Gash's crooked fringe of the international antiques business. When these books succeed in evoking an environment or ethos, the reader can more readily forgive any lack of suspense or ingenuity in the plot. Sometimes the writer depends on heavy research or personal knowledge: Tennis Star Ilie Nastase and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Writer Frank Deford both published thrillers this year set on the international tennis circuit, and retired Quarterback Fran Tarkenton collaborated on a pro- football mystery. On occasion, the voyage into another world may be largely imaginary: H.R.F. Keating launched his delightful and convincing comic series about Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police -- the latest is the poignant Under a Monsoon Cloud (Viking; 221 pages; $15.95) -- without ever having set foot in India.