The Prohibition wars of the ‘20s and...

The Prohibition wars of the ‘20s and ‘30s roar through Detroit again as rival gangs (one of them Purple) fight over the turf and almost nobody on either side of the law stays untainted and incorruptible. No Eliot Ness here. Loren D. Estleman’s Whiskey River (Bantam: $17.97; 272 pp.) stirs together historical research and entirely believeable invention, with only a brief preface to suggest what really happened and what might have but didn’t.

The rise and fall of a young hood named Jack Dance (ne Danzig) is chronicled by reporter/columnist Connie Minor, who in those days consorted with the mobsters, trading discretion for scoops and knowing which news wasn’t fit, or safe, to print. He is looking back on the events from his present role as an advertising writer in a wet-again city.

From a gun battle at night on a frozen river as one gang tries to hijack another gang’s caravan of touring cars sneaking illegal hooch in from Canada, to a final shoot-out when the music stops for Dance, Estleman’s novel is a wizard piece of historical reconstruction, exciting as a gangster film but with a texturing of the characters and the times that rises well above genre. It is an exceptional piece of crime fiction.

Exceptional as well is Laurence Henderson’s The Final Glass (Academy: $18.95; 299 pp.), a tensely credible look within the Provos--the Provisional Irish Republican Army--as a small knot of them plot their explosive protests in present London.

A bomb goes off on a double-decker bus trundling through the London night. It seems to have been purposeless, no evident target aboard and no apparent symbolic importance. The Yard commences its expert researches (the fragments identify the explosive as a brand the Provos have used before) and Henderson looks in on the local Provos, who are as confused as the police by the blast.

Like “Odd Man Out,” Henderson’s novel is a story of betrayal and corruption, reaching to the top of the organization. Increasingly, the story focuses on Maureen Driscoll, a university radical drawn to the IRA by what had seemed sufficiently idealistic reasons to her and her late husband, who presumably was gunned down by British troops during a bungled caper in Northern Ireland. She is in London as a kind of untrusted auxiliary to the male bombers.

The double-crossings are as intricate as anything in early Le Carre; the confrontations are hair-raising, and Driscoll’s fate a matter of high suspense and concern. Henderson, a British author whose fifth novel this is, has a narrative flair both non-stop and highly polished.

Ruth Rendell continues to be improbably prolific and clever and, as always, appears to set herself ever trickier tasks, just so she can make them look easy. In Going Wrong (Mysterious Press: $18.95; 260 pp.), her target is a fairly obviously addled and dangerous young man who has lunch every Saturday with a young woman he has known since they were children.

He imagines she loves him (they were teen-age lovers, briefly). She doesn’t, and is so aware of his unbalanced state that she’s afraid not to keep their routine dates. In his obsession, whatever she does appears to him to confirm her love. Love is seldom quite this blind.

As writing, it is a high-wire act, and Rendell executes it wonderfully well, generating much the same suspense you might feel in the presence of a coiled snake. All hell is going to break loose, but just when, and exactly how? She even manages to be tartly funny, as in the confrontations between the suitor and the girl’s contemptuous mother.

The denouement is sheathed in an irony that is saved for the very last page (by now a frequent Rendell trademark). Her vision is too dark for some readers, but no one is presently conducting more memorable tours de force than Rendell.

There can hardly be an American lawyer these days who is not writing a courtroom thriller on the side. It must be the Turow lure. One of the latest--and very good, too--is Paul Levine, a Miami trial lawyer specializing in First Amendment cases. To Speak for the Dead (Bantam: $17.95; 282 pp.) is his first novel, with a second to be published in the spring.

Lawyers write about lawyers and Levine’s hero is Jake Lassiter, a trial lawyer who occasionally suggests Travis McGee with an LL.B. His client is a dashing young doctor being sued for malpractice in the death during surgery of an elderly patient, whose sexy young wife does not seem as grief-stricken as she might and who is afflicted with indiscriminate hots.

Lawyers also write about judges and courtrooms, and the appeal of both is large and evidently unquenchable. Levine gets out of the courthouse to do a spot of grave-robbing with a very cinematic retired coroner.

Irony also is perennially in vogue, and there is a hearty helping of it in the solution of Lassiter’s case. After a shaky prologue, Levine finds his stride, and in the end, his debut novel is an assured and exciting piece of work.

Crime-fiction writing has been a white near-monopoly but there are exceptions, and Gar Anthony Haywood is a recent one: an able black writer with a black hero. His “Fear of the Night” in 1987 won a $10,000 prize as the year’s best first private-eye novel. Not Long for This World (St. Martin’s: $17.95; 260 pp.) is his second book and again features Aaron Gunner, the eye from the prize-winning original.

Haywood, who lives in Los Angeles, takes the South-Central L.A. of the violent gang wars as his turf this time. A respected leader who has been trying to defuse the gangs is killed in a drive-by shooting. A Legal Aid attorney persuades Gunner to check out whether an accused gang member, who protests his innocence, is really guilty.

Gunner finds a plot--a near-demented plan to handle the gang problem in a euthanasian, Hitlerian way. As with the Provos, betrayal from within is again a strong plot element. But the real interest of Haywood’s book is the realism of the speech, the gang life, the black-police, black-white relations (or non-relations), the despairing intensity of South-Central. The final shoot-out is a shocker, but all too credible. Haywood hasn’t blinked, and his serviceable prose style tells it like it is in areas not all writers could or would invade.

Sharyn McCrumb is a writer of generally comic mysteries, and very good, too. In The Windsor Knot (Ballantine: $16.95; 283 pp.) there is hardly more than a footnote of a mystery, only a good deal of suspense and amusing detail over her series character’s forthcoming nuptials.

Elizabeth MacPherson, a forensics student and amateur detective, is rushing to marry her Scots fiance because he has an invite to the Queen’s garden party in Edinburgh, and Elizabeth, madly Royalist though a loyal Southern American, is eager to attend, which as a wife she can. Thus the knotting, in a Windsor cause.

When Elizabeth gets home to Georgia to prepare for the wedding, there’s a mystery after all: a local woman whose husband apparently has died twice, several years apart. The moral is that you can never be sure about ashes. But the peripheral hardly detracts from the author’s lightly, brightly satirical view of the wedding. McCrumb writes with a sharp-pointed pen. Of one character she says, “Charles’ idea of foreplay was the Mensa test.”

Georges Simenon died in 1989 and had stopped writing novels several years before that, but he was so prolific that new English translations of his work continue to appear. Actually, Madame Maigret’s Own Case (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $17.95; 146 pp.) was first published in Paris in 1950 as “Madame Maigret’s Friend,” and published here in different form in 1959. It has not been available since, and it is Cmdr. Jules Maigret at his quietly persistent best.

Madame Maigret, killing time on a park bench before visiting her dentist, agrees to watch a small boy while his nursemaid runs off on an errand. She’s gone nearly two hours, returns, seizes the boy and dashes off in a taxi with never a thank-you. How can this event possibly relate to an anonymous letter reporting that a quiet bookbinder has burned a body in his furnace? How indeed.

More a police procedural than many Maigrets, with everything but an All Points Bulletin, the solution still derives from the detective’s intuitions about character and relationships. It remains true that no one ever has captured a milieu, Paris, and a particular detecting mode better than Simenon.

Another of the new breed of female private eyes, created by women, is Linda Grant’s Catherine Sayer, gumpump of Blind Trust (Scribners: $18.95; 274 pp.). Like several of the others, she calls California home, San Francisco specifically, and the money is not rolling in, which is also a trend. Then a banker hires her to locate a missing computer whiz who knows how to break through the bank’s computer codes and probably is going to heist $5 million in trust funds when the codes are vulnerable in a few weeks’ time.

Someone wants to stop her, of course; the trail leads all over the West and there is a link to Vietnam. The plot is intricate and if the denouement is not exactly an amazement, the book is a comfortable adventure, although Sayer is not yet as well-defined as, say, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone.

In the quest for ever-more-offbeat crime-solvers, Rick Boyer has given us Doc Adams, an oral surgeon who operates, as you might say, in Massachusetts. In Gone to Earth (Fawcett: $16.95; 295 pp.), Doc and his wife have bought a long-abandoned farm in the Berkshires.

A search of the premises reveals four pristine Harley-Davidsons, one partly buried, in a barn. Not far off are four buried bodies, all young people previously reported missing. Dentistry comes in handy; one of the males is not who he’s reported to be. Missing is a dimwitted young giant abused by family and institutions and clever enough to be lethal.

Boyer conceives a very tense pursuit: a trap eluded, Doc’s career almost capped, some sly misdirection by the author. In the end, the monster is as much to be pitied as feared, as monsters often are, and the real villainy lies elsewhere. This is the sixth in a series, and by now there is probably more of the home life of the Adamses than there might be, but it is here the incidental underscoring to a strong central motif.