BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : A Murder Mystery With a Cast of Familiar Characters : NEVERMORE <i> by William Hjortsberg</i> ; Atheneum $21, 289 pages

Maybe it’s end-of-the-millennium jitters. In the shadow of the year 2000, we have an urge to look back, sum up, compare. Recent books such as “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr or E.L. Doctorow’s “The Waterworks” remind us that decades ago, no sensible New Yorker would walk into Central Park after dark. We’re reassured, in a peculiar sort of way, that violent death in the city isn’t unique to our half of the century.

And, while reading that someone’s throat has been cut is horrible in 1994, a throat cut in 1903 or 1923 can be interesting.

The latest example of Manhattan murder in sepia comes from William Hjortsberg, whose earlier novel, “Falling Angel,” was made into the movie “Angel Heart.” In “Ragtime” fashion, Hjortsberg’s “Nevermore” follows the real-life magician Harry Houdini and the real-life author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through several months in 1923, as they set their minds to the problem of finding a serial murderer. The killer has a penchant for Poe settings--a body stuffed up a chimney a la “Rue Morgue,” a cat walled up with a corpse, an attempted burial alive in a wine cellar--thus, the title, referring to the one-note bird in “The Raven.”

Sir Arthur is in the States promoting spiritualism, his post-Sherlock obsession. He believes that mediums can speak to those who have died and derives comfort from apparent communication with his own beloved mother, who reassures him that everything’s fine back of beyond. Hjortsberg’s subplot involves friction in the Houdini-Doyle friendship. The magician thinks mediums, seances and Ouija boards are all fraudulent--that their apparent marvels can be explained as gags of one kind or another.

Hjortsberg’s forte is describing the gags or tricks behind Houdini’s performances. The silk packet, for instance, a literal gag, “smaller than half a stick of gum,” hidden between the magician’s cheek and lower jaw. He loves describing Houdini’s yogic control, the ability to control his breath and heart rate, allowing him to survive in and escape from water-filled milk cans, sunken coffins or the carcass of a giant squid.

One muscular trick--the truly weird ability to slide that silk packet of needles and thread halfway down his esophagus--brings out the best in Hjortsberg’s writing: “The needles and thread remained clenched in his throat. He plucked at the end of his tongue, pulling a single thread from his mouth. Threaded needles dangled every inch or so, a lethal silver fringe glittering in the spotlight. Houdini’s arm extended full length, prompting wild applause from the astonished audience.”

Likewise, Hjortsberg takes an obvious delight in historical detail--New York real estate, fashion designers of the ‘20s, cars (Jordan Playboy, Apperson Eight), the newspaper columns of Damon Runyon. Hjortsberg is a man who has had a lot of fun reading microfilm.

Sometimes it works, as in one lyrical passage in which a young woman we know to be doomed takes a bus down Fifth Avenue and then walks home through Greenwich Village, listening to a little boy on the bus, watching the children in Washington Square, smelling the bread outside a Sicilian bakery.

(For really bittersweet nostalgia there’s this: On a visit to Hollywood, Sir Arthur’s children ride out to the beach at Santa Monica every afternoon on the Red Line trolley.)

Along with the two famous historical men, “Nevermore” features one fictional woman: Opal, a simple farm girl who announced at 15 that she was the reincarnation of Isis, the ancient Egyptian fertility goddess.

As is every simple farm girl’s dream, she married a 63-year-old textile tycoon with a bum ticker; now she lives alone in a Fifth Avenue chateau. Opal starts out in the Aimee Semple McPherson mode, but as the story progresses turns into someone you might have met at Big Sur in 1971, complete with massage oil, an ankh on her stationery, Kama Sutra isometrics and gestalt therapy (“Let all the poison and fear flow out.”). An encounter with her leads both Hjortsberg and Houdini to lose their good sense, culminating in the following purple sentence: “A lifetime of puritanical self-control left the magician unfamiliar with the labyrinthine delight of depravity.”

“Nevermore” trembles on the brink of some interesting observations about the nature of celebrity, the need to believe in the afterlife, and the line between miracles and well-done fakery. But Hjortsberg resists the temptation to delve into the profound.

Except for one intriguing observation that pops up apropos of nothing in particular. Damon Runyon, in his cameo appearance, recalls his friend and colleague Bat Masterson, who, after riding with Wyatt Earp, became a sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph. According to Runyon, the last words Masterson typed late one night in an empty newsroom (before he keeled over) were: “In this life we all get an equal share of ice. The rich get it in the summer and the poor get it in the winter.”