'GRUB STREET' OFFERS FASCINATING 18TH-CENTURY TAKE ON MURDER.

Byline: Linda Litchfield Special to the Daily News

In "Murder in Grub Street" (Putnam's; $21.95), Bruce Alexander returns to the mean streets of 18th-century London and the real-life career of Sir John Fielding, the remarkable blind magistrate who was the brother of the author of "Tom Jones" and the founder of the Bow Street Runners.

In this sequel to the well-received "Blind Justice," a Grub Street printer, his family, and apprentices are all murdered in their sleep, apparently by a mentally disturbed poet who was found at the scene of the crime with the murder weapon in his hand.

Fielding refuses to accept the obvious and, with the help of Jeremy Proctor, his 13-year-old orphaned protege, and Dr. Sam Johnson, continues to investigate the mass murder. There may be a connection with the members of a puritanical religious cult who have recently arrived from the American colonies to help London's poor and save the city from its sins.

This type of mystery obviously requires a great deal of careful research, but with a first-person narrative (by Jeremy), the author's task becomes doubly difficult - to re-create the mind-set and prose style of the era without alienating modern readers. And this Alexander, which is a pen name for former Daily News book editor Bruce Cook) does beautifully.

For some reason, the 18th century hasn't been as popular with the writers of historical mysteries as other eras, but Fielding and his famed Runners - the prototype of what would become England's first real police force - are a natural.

Considering that not many mysteries are set in the 18th century, a surprising number have featured Benjamin Franklin. Robert Lee Hall has a successful series about the famous inventor-statesman - he's the perfect protagonist for a crime novel.

In "Murder by the Waters" (St. Martin's; $21.95) Franklin is visiting the fashionable spa of Bath; its healing waters made it a gathering place for all ranks of British society in the 1750s. They also attracted gamesters, con men and criminals who preyed on the more affluent.

In this book, a lovely young girl - who may be an heiress - is pursued by three different men, one of whom has murder, as well as marriage, on his mind.

Like "Murder in Grub Street," the book is narrated by a 13-year-old boy, Franklin's fictitious illegitimate son. However, this novel suffers in comparison. Although the characters and setting are well drawn, the plot is not as complex and the writing is often annoying - there is a continuous repetition of plot points the reader is all too aware of. The verdict? A thin but enjoyable excursion into the past.

In "Two for the Dough" (Scribner; $22) Janet Evanovich returns with a sequel to her successful "One for the Money," which was nominated for an Edgar for best first mystery last year. They both feature the hilarious misadventures of female bounty hunter Stephanie Plum in a tough neighborhood in Trenton, N.J., where most young women still get their fashion sense from Barbie dolls.

In the first book, the unemployed, I'll-do-almost-anything-for-money Stephanie went to work for her bailbondsman cousin. In the second, a routine search for bail jumper Kenny Mancuso - in the best private-eye tradition - turns into a search for a dangerous killer. Also on the trail is one of Mancuso's cousins, Joe Morelli, a tough vice cop who has an on-again, off-again relationship with Stephanie, either saving her life on more than one occasion or struggling to resist the temptation to strangle her himself.

Much of the book's charm lies in its affectionate, acerbic portrayal of Stephanie's blue-collar world and the strong ties of family and friends that sustain it. When her search takes her to the establishment of an underhanded undertaker, she brings along her gun-toting grandmother whose greatest delight is attending wakes (in one amusing scene, Grandma and her friends compare weapons while getting their hair done).

Evanovich's work proves that nothing is sacred in the mystery field: Men no longer have a monopoly on the wise-cracking, street-wise narrator/protagonist!

In "Killed in Fringe Time" (Simon & Schuster; $21) by William L. DeAndrea, television network troubleshooter Matt Cobb is called in when the company's answer to Jay Leno and Dave Letterman is poisoned right after he signs a $45 million contract. Since the sharp-tongued talk-show host was as unpopular off the screen as he was popular on the air, there is no shortage of suspects, from the producer-girlfriend he was cheating on to the dangerously ambitious assistant he was cheating with. When a letter bomb nearly kills one of Cobb's prime suspects, he realizes that there may be two killers on the loose.

This Edgar-winning author and expert on crime novels once again pens a sophisticated, witty expose of the machinations of Manhattan's high-level TV executives. He also pulls off a very neatly done surprise ending.

The prolific DeAndrea has another book out called "Written in Fire" (Walker; $19.95), which is a Nero Wolfe-type mystery set in Wyoming in the late 19th century. Bullets couldn't stop the career of legendary lawman Lobo Blacke, who is now confined to a wheelchair.

He has bought a newspaper in a small town controlled by a ruthless cattle baron who may also be a master criminal. Blacke has sworn to bring him to justice with the help of the mystery's narrator, the appropriately named Quinn Booker, the scion of a wealthy New York family who helped the lawman write his best-selling memoirs. And Booker is one city dude who knows how to take care of himself.

Unfortunately, the solution to the actual crime - the murder of a well-known photographer - is too easy to solve, but with these colorful characters and setting, DeAndrea could have another winner on his hands. Fans of both the mystery and western genres should be delighted.

In "The Cover Girl Killer" (St. Martin's; $21.95), Richard Lupoff returns to the world of the obsessed collectors of popular culture (old paperback novels in this case; he has previously written mysteries on comic books and classic cars) and to insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey, who specializes in "odd" cases in the Bay Area.

When a multimillionaire dies before his eyes in a helicopter accident at Lake Tahoe, Lindsey must find the beneficiary of the $4 million insurance policy - a beautiful, unknown model who posed for the cover of a hard-boiled paperback from the early 1950s, a book no one has heard of, published by a company that may never have existed.

The book takes a political spin when Lindsey discovers that the company went bankrupt because of pressure by the House Un-American Activities Committee: It had released a book by a Lincoln Brigade veteran about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War - a little-known and fascinating chapter in modern U.S. history.

The author isn't afraid to tackle such controversial subjects as the lives ruined by McCarthyism - his last two mysteries concerned the Tuskegee Airmen and the black film industry in the 1930s and '40s - and Lindsey's professional and sexual relationship with a black police officer is an important element in each book.

Fans may be dismayed by the author's decision to change certain important elements in this intriguing series. It will be fascinating to see what happens in the next one.