Books In Brief.

Pursuit & Persuasion, by Sally S. Wright (Multnomah, 356 pp., $10.99)

This is the third of Sally Wright's Ben Reese mystery novels, and it lives up to the promise of its predecessors. There is always the danger that a continuing character in a detective series will become a stock figure. This doesn't happen with the great ones, of course. Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion neither grow stale nor remain the same: Each develops from fatuous young lord-about-town to homme serieux in the course of his novels. Even Hercule Poirot, unloved by his creator, grows in human sympathy as he goes along.

Ben Reese is a Mensch to begin with-a hero from the Normandy landing, a widower doing his best not to give in to despair. But our sense of him deepens as we see him reacting to different people-in this novel, the loner who bullies dogs and cats and who takes pleasure in seeing the works of man crumble; the hot-tempered young sculptor whom the murder victim and her late husband had befriended; the elegant old man battling bone-marrow cancer and longing for intelligent conversation; the victim herself, Georgina Fletcher, whom Ben never met in life but whom he must come to know in order to solve her murder.

He is aided in this effort by the poems Georgina left behind. Writing poetry on behalf of a character is always a chancy proposition for the novelist-even Nicholas Blake (who in his other life was the poet C. Day Lewis) didn't attempt it in Head of a Traveler-but Sally Wright takes the precaution of having an old friend of Georgina's tell us that "she loved poetry far too much to take her own mediocrities seriously." Rather, her poetry is in effect her diary (though, by the way, as a "verbal contraption," to use Auden's term, much of it is quite good), and it does indeed let both Ben and us into her mind and heart. But this is not a drawing-room novel, and the climactic scene, on a hidden beach overshadowed by the ruins of a Scottish castle, is a masterpiece.