Mayhem Afloat Peppered With Old Salts

DEAD RUN by Tony Gibbs (Random House: $16.95; 288 pp.) WISHFUL THINKING by Frank Wyka (Carroll & Graf: $15.95; 223 pp.) BEN FRANKLIN TAKES THE CASE by Robert Lee Hall (St. Martin’s Press: $16.95; 256 pp.) SCORPIUS by John Gardner (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $12.95; 319 pp.) THE ANGEL OF TORREMOLINOS by David Serafin (St. Martin’s Press: $13.95; 192 pp.) SATURDAY NIGHT DEAD by Richard Rosen (Penguin: $16.95; 277 pp.) THE BOTTOM LINE IS MURDER by Robert Eversz (Viking: $16.95; 249 pp.) COLLECTED STORIES by Ruth Rendell (Pantheon: $19.95 ; 536 pp.) THE MYSTERY LOVER’S BOOK OF QUOTATIONS compiled by Jane E. Horning (Mysterious Press: $16.95 ; 256 pp.)

Tony Gibbs is a former executive editor and yachting correspondent of the New Yorker and the son of one of the magazine’s founding stylists, its longtime drama critic, Wolcott Gibbs. Earlier books by Gibbs, who now lives in Santa Barbara, include “Practical Sailing,” “Navigation” and “Cruising in a Nutshell.” Dead Run, his debut as a thriller writer, is one of the best of the year, a characterful, active and salt-sprayed tale enriched by as much boat lore as Erskine Childers’ classic “Riddle of the Sands” from early in the century.

A resourceful young woman named Gillian Verdean inherits a beloved but worse-for-the-wear 65-foot ketch from an uncle who in his prime years had used Glory for a bit of arms-running. Now he has been murdered in his bunk, and two equally sinister villains are scheming to get at Glory and find the hidden treasure (whatever it is) that Uncle Dennis said would settle his debts and make Gillian rich.

Gibbs has invented a wonderful cast: the heroine herself, a drunken but loyal first mate, an infiltrating spy, a senator’s oversexed daughter, a porn actress who wants to open a brothel and settle down, and the villains and their henchpersons. No one we meet is quite above reproach, although Gibbs’s handling is discretion itself.

Gillian is in the honored tradition of spirited and independent women and half a century ago, she would have been played by Jean Arthur.

But the special excitement of the book is Gibbs’ sure-footed way around the deck, building to a deadly sea chase by night through an even deadlier gale off Long Island. It is a superior piece of sustained narrative writing, and “Dead Run” is altogether a rouser.

Frank Wyka’s Wishful Thinking is a clever and continuously surprising psychological thriller set in the beach cities of Southern California. In its pleasantly unpretentious way, the book has much to say about the muddled values in a society where the haves are notoriously insecure and the have-nots expect to make it big (not necessarily legally) any minute.

A man whose wife is a pill addict arranges a faked kidnaping of their 4-year-old daughter in the hope that it will scare the wife out of her habit. He also hopes to get a piece of the ransom money from his rich father-in-law. Everything goes wrong. The husband is murdered, the kidnaper proves to be a concealed psychopath with his own plans for the ransom money. His girlfriend, who went along only because it presumably was not a real kidnaping, now finds herself trying to protect the child from the kidnaper.

Wyka creates terrific suspense (you have the feeling Hitchcock would have been interested), leading to an offshore confrontation between a helicopter and a yacht. The relation between the child and her guardian is very affecting, and the resolution is unorthodox but entirely satisfying.

Robert Lee Hall’s previous mystery, “Murder at San Simeon,” with William Randolph Hearst and other real-life figures mingling with creatures of fiction, seemed to hint at the exhaustion of the celebrity genre. Yet his new one, Ben Franklin Takes the Case, is a fine and atmospheric visit to 18th-Century London in the years before the Revolution, and with an undeniable celebrity at its center.

Ben, in London to represent the colony of Pennsylvania in a quarrel with His Majesty’s government, finds an old printer friend murdered, a nice young boy living in virtual slavery and everybody lying about everything. Franklin gets to the heart of it and appears to have anticipated the stun gun to get himself out of a deadly mess at the finale.

James Bond lives on, in the de-colorized imitations by John Gardner (an Englishman, no kin to the late American novelist of the same name). Scorpius is the seventh of the post-Ian Fleming Bonds. The supervillain of the title has invented a culture called The Meek Ones, populated mostly by young people he has reclaimed from drugs only to brainwash into willingly suicidal living bombs who are wiping out British politicians at a ghastly rate.

The grand climax (007 and a pretty girl escaping the villain’s fortress) is set at Hilton Head, S.C., and cottonmouth moccasins are the peril. In Fleming’s hands, the Bonds were a high foolishness, but stylishly told and with a dramatist’s sense of entrances, scenes and exits. For all the borrowings from the formula, Gardner has not yet purloined the style or the drama. A shift of locale is always welcome, and David Serafin’s The Angel of Torremolinos is a police procedural set in that Spanish coastal resort. As in most procedurals, there is more than one plot line. A serial killer is knocking off young male tourists, apparently because they are into drugs and other vices. At the same time, Basque terrorists are commencing a series of resort bombings, more to harass the government and scare off tourists than to kill anyone.

Serafin’s series character, a fat, middle-age Madrid detective, Superintendent Luis Bernal, who has both wife and mistress, handles both women and both plots with equal effectiveness, but not without demands from the higher brass to forget the killer and concentrate on the Basques. Brass is evidently brass universally in its petty tyrannies and myopic clumsiness. The Torremolinos setting and the procedures themselves are well-evoked, although the whole caper is rather perfunctory and mechanical (a recurring danger in police stories) and Bernal too lightly sketched to be engaging in the way Maigret and Gideon have been.

Saturday Night Dead obviously recalls “Saturday Night Live,” and Richard Rosen, whose third mystery this is, once wrote skits for “Saturday Night Live.” The show in his book is called “Last Laughs” but is otherwise an exact facsimile. The show appears to be on its last legs, ratingswise, and its original, iconoclastic creator, Roy Ganz, has been brought in to try a resuscitation.

The celebrity host in a fateful week is a drunken baseball star, a recent Most Valuable Player named Dave Kasick. Assigned to keep him dry until after the broadcast is a former ballplayer turned private eye named Harvey Blissberg, who played in Rosen’s two previous mysteries. Ganz jumps, falls or is pushed from a high window. Almost anyone could have applied the push, and almost everyone would have been glad to. Who did and why is a tangled tale of changed identities, ghost writers and purloined jokes. Murder aside, it seems reasonable that the putting together of the show is or was about as chaotic as Rosen describes, with the metallic clash of ego upon ego as the prevailing sound effect. The credibility of the atmosphere redeems the book from the ordinary.

It is private eye time again in Robert Eversz’s The Bottom Line Is Murder. The novelties, on the slight side to be sure, are that the eye, Paul Marston, specializes in corporate mischiefs and that his new sidekick is a female boxer named Angel Cantini. (Invention has been stretched taut as a garrote.) An executive dies in a plane crash that appears to have been no accident.

The aftermath reveals murderous infighting in a corporate family, with ruthless takeover bids and assorted betrayals. The settings include Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco, and there is the occasional good line (“None of the cars on the street grew up in Detroit”).

But the wisecracking private eye has about worn out his welcome unless he retained some of the sensitivity that Ross Macdonald and now Robert Parker have given him, and Rosen hasn’t. Otherwise Raymond Chandler’s “shop-soiled Galahad” is merely shop-soiled.

The Collected Stories by Ruth Rendell includes no previously unpublished work but gathers under one roof so to speak nearly 536 pages and 38 pieces from four previous collections. Seen together, the stories confirm the breadth of her often macabre and invariably original imagination and the literary grace (and the sly skill) with which she brings off her tales of the very dark side of psychology.

“The Fallen Curtain” is really a straight story about a non-crime, an echo across two lives that is startling in its gentleness. “The Convolvulus Clock” is about the escalation of the trivial to the tragic. Horror is a central ingredient in most of Rendell’s work, but there are varieties of horror, as of religious experience, and no one, I think, now writes about what could be called criminal aberration better than she does.