Incident at Twenty-Mile By Trevanian St. Martin's. 308 pages. ($24.95) The pseudonymous, mono-monikered author who calls himself Trevanian has emerged after 15 years of literary silence, with a rich, dark, relentlessly entertaining story that is part spoof, part salute to the Western novel. ...

The Crazyladies of Pearl Street. By Trevanian. Crown. 384 pages. $24.95. There is nothing surprising about the autobiographical novel by bestselling mystery writer Trevanian's Depression-era Albany, N.Y., boyhood. And that's the charm of his tale. This detailed reconstruction of life in...

Mr. Trevanian is not only a better writer than most of those who turn out suspense novels, he has also made a computerlike analysis of the various elements readers look for in such novels and included one of each. His hero [in "The Eiger Sanction"], for example, is a masterpiece of conflicting qualities—something for everybody—but he is still within the limits of the willing suspension of disbelief. Jonathan Hemlock is an immensely popular professor of art history; an ardent coll...

["Shibumi"] is certainly not the kind of book that is bought to impress oneself or one's friends. Its popularity is, however, something of a puzzle. "Shibumi" is a curiously old-fashioned novel. It often brings to mind such picaresque melodramas of the past as "Anthony Adverse" and "Scaramouche." Trevanian's elegant Anthony Adverse, his brilliant Scaramouche, is one Nicholai Alexandrovitch Hel, born in Shanghai in the nineteen-twenties of...

Nothing quite equals lying in the summer sun—having already paid your dues to the multinational corporations for exorbitantly priced gasoline, ridiculously priced motels and, if things continue as they have, beach sand itself that costs money—and reading a good book about one man alone fighting the insidious system. So consider this man, Nicholai Alexandrovitch Hel, hero of [Shibumi], as he confronts for the first time the hatchet man of the megalomaniacal—and successfully so—Mot...