Summertime, the living is easy and the...

Summertime, the living is easy and the eye prowls the shelves for equally easy beachside reading . . . something that will thud painlessly onto your chest when the warm sun sends you nodding off.

The writers of popular fiction are normally all too helpful in filling the void with escapist literature . . . the beautiful, but amoral, heroine bedding her way to the top in the fashion (or Hollywood, or Wall Street, or publishing) world . . . the serial killer merciless stalking our clear-eyed, cleft-chinned hero through the alleys of New York (or Paris, or Singapore, or London) . . . the former, guilt-ridden, CIA agent stumbling across an international terrorist plot that will hurtle the Mideast (or Central America, or South America or the Eastern Seaboard) into a bloody morass.

Something odd has happened in the summer of 1989, however, because while the tried-and-true formula stories are certainly with us in abundance, several novels have surfaced with considerably more substance than we associate with the season.

As a case in point, the first novel by mature Australian advertising executive, Bryce Courtenay, is one of those maddening, epic, novels that defy easy explanation because it would seem to sprawl, but somehow doesn’t; that seems to lack a central point, but most certainly has one; that seems to have a protagonist of limited appeal, but who, instead, is riveting. The Power of One covers the adventures of Peekay, a boy of British descent from age 5 through 17, and his upbringing in South Africa during, and immediately following, World War II when English influence was passing into Afrikaner hands and the grim seeds of today’s Apartheid were beginning to flower. Here is a boy who should be insufferable--he’s bright-bordering-on- brilliant, multitalented and born with a charisma that cuts through social and racial lines like a knife. His ambition, almost from the first page: to become the welter weight champion of the world. Oh, a boxing story? Perhaps, in about the same way that “The Old Man and the Sea” was a fishing story. The influences on Peekay’s character--known as “Tadpole Angel” to the thousands of bush Africans who fall under his almost mystic spell--range all the way from, of all things, a scraggly chicken known as Granpa Chook, to an illiterate, gnarled Kaffir, Geel Piet, his first trainer, to Doc, an aging German naturalist who becomes his mentor. Told against the background of the growing racial tensions in South Africa and the constant English-Boer frictions, “The Power of One” is a totally engrossing story of the metamorphosis of a most remarkable young man and the almost spiritual influence he has on others. No goody-goody, Peekay has both humor and a refreshingly earthy touch, and his adventures, at times, are hair-raising in their suspense. “The Power of One” is a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

As contemporary as tomorrow, William Brashler’s Traders is a no-holds-barred look at the eat-or-be-eaten world of the Chicago Board of Trade, the commodities future market where nice guys not only don’t finish first, but are lucky to finish at all.

For Joanie Yff, life, one way or another, is going to be something more rewarding and exciting than her work as a beautician in West Palm Beach, and the way out are night courses in economics, a few wise investments and then parlaying a one-time casual encounter with commodities wheeler-dealer Ken Korngold into a runner’s job on the trading floor of the Chicago exchange. Here is a world of inside deals, drugs, double-crosses, greed and runaway venality. And, as Joanie Yff climbs up the ladder to a dealership in her own right, she learns to play the game on her own terms. This is a naked look at the underside of a world largely populated by shallow people with enormous greeds who live on the flip of a coin.

It’s almost impossible to like most of them, but what makes them tick is a compelling study in human nature.

Novelist Walter J. Boyne, the author of 10 books on aviation, a former director of the National Air and Space Museum and co-author of the best-selling “The Wild Blue,” is off and running with Trophy for Eagles, the first of a proposed trilogy on aviation from infancy to today’s space shuttles. And this is a fascinating study of the wild-eyed romantics who prowled the wild blue yonder between 1927, the year of Charles Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, and the growing role of aviation in the Spanish Civil War.

Fiction blends neatly with fact as the protagonist, Frank Bandfield, a visionary engineer who loves to build planes but who has the business sense of an Irish Setter, crosses paths with the real-life pioneers of the era--Lindbergh, Howard Hughes, Richard Byrd, Jimmy Doolittle, Eddie Rickenbacker, Amelia Earhart, etc. But it is the competitiveness between Bandfield (Bandy) and the World War I German ace, Bruno Hafner, that is the ignition point in “Trophy for Eagles” as the two men battle both on the barn-storming race courses of the ‘30s and in the fledgling aircraft industry. It’s a competitiveness that will culminate in a showdown over the war-torn countryside of Spain.

A strong, narrative writer with a fine sense of three-dimensional characterization, Boyne brings his encyclopedic knowledge of aviation into sharp focus with this tense thriller about the iron men and women who populated that early, wonderful world when you stayed aloft, thanks to a few strips of wood, scraps of canvas, a balky, coughing engine and lots and lots of pure guts.

Although Kate Coscarelli’s fourth novel is more in the escapist, summer mode, it’s unfortunate title, Pretty Women, suggests far more bubbly froth than this well-crafted, flash-back puzzler deserves. Suggestive of “A Letter to Three Wives,” (two in this case), Tess Kipling, dean of women at a prestigious private Illinois college, and Samara Mulhare, who heads up a large Hollywood movie studio, are called to Colorado Springs by an old acquaintance for a meeting of extreme urgency. What these two women, and a few others fleshing out the meeting, have in common is basically simple: All were young military wives, 20 years earlier, living with their husbands in post-war Tripoli-- an experience paralleling author Coscarelli’s own life. What happened in those hot-house days of shared joys, woes and monotony that, suddenly, binds them together? What is the secret that they unknowingly share that, 20 years later in 1976, is so critical that it must be aired? None, individually, has the whole answer. Together, though, the pieces begin meshing.

While there are a few plot flaws here as the careers of the two principal protagonists are plumbed, “Pretty Women” (hate that title) is nevertheless a satisfying mystery of old stones being overturned and old secrets being exposed.

THE POWER OF ONE by Bryce Courtenay (Random House : $18.95; 523 pp.) TRADERS by William Brashler (Atheneum: $18.95; 320 pp.) TROPHY FOR EAGLES by Walter J. Boyne (Crown: $19.95; 454 pp.)

PRETTY WOMEN by Kate Coscarelli (NAL Books: $18.95; 362 pp.)