LOOK WHO'S TALKING

BY NOW SO MANY BOOKS HAVE BEEN written about the O.J. Simpson case that it is time to start piling them into separate little stacks. There are the quickie tell-alls from peripheral characters (Kato Kaelin, Faye Resnick). There are the tell-alls from major players who have little to say and mediocre co-writers (Madam Foreman, by several jurors, belongs here, as does O.J.'s own I Want to Tell You). There are the joke books (O.J.'s Legal Pad being one of the better entries in this category). And now all the previous works can be tossed aside with the arrival, a mere five months after the verdict, of the post-trial memoirs by those true insiders, the lawyers.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was first off the mark with Reasonable Doubts, a discussion of the legal issues of the case with very little real drama. That missing ingredient, however, has been whipped up in generous gobs in both prosecutor Christopher Darden's In Contempt (ReganBooks; $26), written with Jess Walter, and this week's offering, defense attorney Robert Shapiro's The Search for Justice (Warner Books; $24.95), written with Larkin Warren. There are no bombshells here, but both lawyers take the reader on a breathless you-are-there ride, evoking once again all the emotions of that fevered epoch in this country's history. Which emotions, of course, depends on whose Rashomon-like tale you are reading at the time.

The books reflect their authors' public personas. Darden's autobiographical memoir is brooding, complex, ambitious and at times emotionally overwrought. He has a habit, for instance, of referring to Simpson with an unprintable epithet. Shapiro takes a more measured, if Hollywoody, approach. But in both works, details of the lawyers' behind-the-scenes machinations remain strangely compelling. Darden describes a jaunt to the Bahamas, where he unsuccessfully pursued a tip that Simpson was planning to flee there the day of the Bronco chase, and both writers float rumors that juror Francine Florio-Bunten was dismissed under suspicious circumstances. Shapiro also reveals that the defense team offered to have Simpson take a lie detector test at the outset, knowing full well that the prosecution would never agree to admit the results, whatever they were, into evidence. And he describes the moment when he realized that Simpson, due to turn himself in to the police, had vanished: "I don't think there was anyone in that room who didn't believe ... that O.J. had gone off to kill himself." (Noting that Simpson signed his farewell note with a happy face drawn inside the O, Darden writes, "A suicide note with a happy face. Right.")