CRIMINAL PURSUITS

The veteran British writer on espionage, Ted Allbeury, is said to have been the model for Len Deighton’s Harry Palmer in “The Ipcress File.” Allbeury served in British Intelligence during World War II and has since written more than 30 novels about spies and spying. If he is not quite the literary stylist John LeCarre is, he writes about spying with the same candor, authority and lack of cloak-and-dagger histrionics.

His new book, SHOW ME A HERO (Mysterious Press: $21.95, 369 pp.) is cryptically described as “based on truth,” and is a fascinating account of a young Russian spy, a devoted second-generation Communist, who is assigned to New York. Behind his cover as a book dealer, he recruits an effective network of informants (one of his contacts is Klaus Fuchs).

As years pass he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet leadership, and worried that the confrontational Kremlin leaders will (and are willing to) provoke World War III. The spy, Andrei Aarons, becomes a kind of double agent, advising Harry Truman and John Kennedy on his reading of Moscow intentions.

It’s an abundantly detailed story, from the minutiae of spy-craft made familiar by both Allbeury and LeCarre, to the glimpses of Kremlin infighting.

The large cast of characters includes Nikita Khrushchev as well as Aarons’ loyal siblings, two remarkable wives and his high-placed Soviet mentor, himself grown bitterly disillusioned.

An insightful portrait of a complicated man, and a special glimpse of history, Allbeury’s book is suspenseful despite the lack of traditional whiz-bang plotting, and it is a useful reminder of just how near at hand war was in the hottest of the Cold War years.

Another retrieving of the Cold War, a good deal less persuasive than Allbeury’s, is William F. Buckley Jr.’s A VERY PRIVATE PLOT (Morrow: $20, 269 pp.), the latest outing for his CIA operative, Blackford Oakes, now head of covert operations for the agency.

The cumbersome structure makes the story a flashback from 1995, when a liberal version of Jesse Helms is seeking to ban by law all covert operations. When Oakes won’t discuss a particular past operation, the senator has him jailed for contempt of Congress. The book is a teasing out of the facts of that operation.

A small knot of zealots in Moscow was plotting to assassinate Gorbachev for betraying the ideals of the revolution. The CIA learned of it and could foil the plot--if President Reagan chose to foil it. Since Gorbachev has recently acted in a movie there is no real suspense, of course, and the past tense narrative contributes to the undermining of the drama, even though the plotters are watched close-up.

But the politico-moral dilemma the president and the CIA face--to betray the plotters they must also betray their source--is provocative and Buckley has a good time with it. Like Allbeury, he finds Soviet functionaries sorely torn between loyalty and wisdom. The author catches Reagan’s voice very well.

It is a potentially engrossing story, not helped by the expository structure, and only partially redeemed by Buckley’s splendid air of confidence. (He makes a fleeting appearance in the story.)

Michael Dibdin’s previous novel, “Cabal,” was an intricate tale of evil deeds in and about the Vatican. His new one, THE DYING OF THE LIGHT (Pantheon: $19, 151 pp.) is wildly and enchantingly unlike it.

The guests in a parlor of a country house sound like refugees from Agatha Christie: the colonel, the wealthy invalid lady, the entrepreneur incessantly on the telephone and so on. A Jane Marple-like figure chatting with her friend sees them all, if you believe her, as suspects in a murder.

Don’t believe her. They’re all inmates in a ghastly nursing home run by an alcoholic sadist and his sister. Imposing a murder plot is a ploy by two of the women to keep sane in maddening circumstances. And in Dibdin’s unusually creative plot, a real death occurs, and the ploy becomes a plot to make the police dig deeper. The surprising plot twists are without end. Hardly longer than a novella, Dibdin’s book succeeds in using a light- hearted tone to make a harrowing situation more moving, not less.

Jane Langton writes of New England matters and illustrates her novels with her own charming pen and ink drawings. DIVINE INSPIRATION (Viking: $20; 408 pp.) centers on a Boston church that is getting a magnificent new organ. One learns much about the spitzflute and the trumpet en chamade and the tuning of an organ.

Then again, there is the abandoned baby crawling up the church steps, and the missing mother, who is or was an organist, and unexplained fires and vandalization and, like an ominous murmur throughout, the matter of the decaying piles that sustain the great Gothic church. A “Laura”-like love story, a vivid cadre of organists and a much-beset minister are further pleasures in Langton’s lively work. Prof. Homer Kelly, ex-detective, is her resident sleuth but this time he is largely an acolyte to the principals.

DEADLY ADMIRER (Walker & Co.: $19.95; 197 pp.) is a second novel by Christine Green, an English writer who trained as a nurse, about Kate Kinsella, a private eye who goes back to nursing when things get slow. This time, working the emergency ward, she treats another nurse who has just checked after attempting suicide but changing her mind.

The almost-suicide is deeply disturbed and imagines she’s being followed. Given the genre, we had best believe she’s not wrong. She is a visiting nurse and one of her country patients is murdered. Nurse Kinsella traces the troubles to a sad, surprising end, and the book is the better for the authenticity of the work and the provincial England where it takes place.

Michael Gilbert, who wrote his first mysteries on his lap, commuting to work as a London lawyer, is now in his 82nd year and one of the deans of British crime fiction. His 27th novel, ROLLERCOASTER (Carroll & Graf: $19.95; 250 pp.), features his continuing London detective Patrick Petrella, now a superintendent in the Docklands area of the Thames on the east side of London.

The book is a fast-moving and atmospheric police procedural likely to remind constant readers of the excellent series on Gideon of Scotland Yard by the late John Creasey. More than one problem confronts Petrella: racial gangs on the prowl, charges of police brutality underscored when an investigative reporter for the accusing newspaper is murdered, a nasty trade in child pornography (photographed in Amsterdam, distributed in England); the consumers including influential men capable of hamstringing the police.

As writers age, their books sometimes grow more sedentary, like the writers themselves. Not so Gilbert. His book rockets along, with car chases, stealthy pursuits, head-bashings, stakeouts and a final intimation that police work, too, is like housework and sex; it never stays done.