Books: Urban Razzle, Fatal Glamour

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In writing as in real estate, the operating word is location. Readers like to travel, to escape to a setting, preferably hot, sticky and fatally glamorous. Certain television producers understand this instinctively, which is why Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas do not star in a show called Toronto Vice. Canada's rising cosmopolis may suggest a bright promise of public responsibility and efficiency, but it is Miami whose hard-edged pastels define the pitiless sensuality of the '80s.

South Florida is also alluring as a beachhead for Latin American culture, politics and business, some of it conducted conspicuously with drug money packed in suitcases. This, in turn, has attracted a large number of state and federal agents, whose aims and agendas do not always coincide. Such activities go far to explain the growing number of curious writers who have fattened their frequent-flyer accounts with regular trips in and out of Miami International Airport.

The best known is Joan Didion, a native Californian with literary and intellectual power bases in Los Angeles and Manhattan. Lengthy excerpts from her book, simply titled Miami (Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; $17.95), appeared over the summer in the New York Review of Books. Didion's credentials as ; novelist and essayist are well established. Play It as It Lays set the '70s standard for Southern California malaise, and her journalism was carefully calibrated to record fine cracks in sanity and personal relationships. She has expanded more recent reportage and fiction (Salvador, Democracy) to poke along the fault lines of the commonweal.

Didion is a virtuoso of the moods of violence and intrigue, but the complexity of public subjects frequently causes her chiseled prose to shift into the arabesque line that runs from Tocqueville to Murray Kempton. "I never passed through security for a flight to Miami," she writes early in her new book, "without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly."

T.D. Allman (Miami: City of the Future; Atlantic Monthly Press; 422 pages; $22.50) and David Rieff (Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America; Little, Brown; 230 pages; $16.95) feel less threatened by Miami's possibilities: the former because he finds the city's history, architecture and ethnic mingle fun; the latter because he is distanced by irony.

Allman, a Florida-born journalist who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, offers the livelier version of the city's emergence from alligator swamp to Casablanca, U.S.A. His candidate for founding mother is Julia Tuttle, the independent wife of a Cleveland industrialist who persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway to the shores of Biscayne Bay, where Tuttle had inherited land from her father. The area promised freedom from the occasional winter frosts that inconvenienced rich vacationers 70 miles north at Palm Beach.