CRIME & PALM TREES.

Byline: Elizabeth M. Cosin Daily News Staff Writer

It is hot, Southern California hot. Sidewalks burn holes through the soles of Doc Martens. Santa Anas parch throats, and a yellowed haze turns everything ugly. On mornings like this, traffic accidents become riots. And somewhere hidden away, unassuming writers nervously finger their PC keyboards and plot someone's demise.

Three time zones away, a tropical breeze from the Atlantic cools the afternoon, leaving a sticky humidity and an edginess in the air. Another writer, laptop open on a cafe table, a fruit iced tea sweating nearby, anxiously waits for something to happen. It's only a matter of time in South Florida - a deadly mixture of cigars and cigar boats, smells of fried bananas and suntan oil, and kids with street-tough mugs and metal under their jackets who, like the alligators in waterways, have their eyes peeled for the next wayward tourist.

These authors know one thing for sure: Mysteries pay. Miami and Los Angeles are not only crime capitals, but crime-writing capitals, too.

``It's become a major phenomenon,'' says Maurice O'Sullivan, a professor of English Studies at Rollins College, a small liberal arts school in the shadow of Disney World near Orlando. He has been studying and teaching about mysteries and mystery writers since well before it was an acceptable college course.

``They are both sort of lost paradises,'' says Les Saniford, whose books featuring John Deal are set in and around South Florida. Saniford, who teaches writing at Florida International University just outside Miami, studied screenwriting at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles before eventually settling in the Sunshine State. He has a rare affinity for both places.

``I like to say that if only Florida had mountains it would be perfect,'' he says looking up at an overcast, muggy sky over Miami's trendy South Beach. The sky is a hiccup or two away from an exploding downpour.

``They are both places where almost anything can happen at anytime and often does. Weather, crime, you name it. They are violent and beautiful at the same time. The new frontiers of America.''

Here in Los Angeles, the home of the original hard-boiled detective, Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe have been replaced by Elvis Cole, Easy Rawlins and Rina Lazarus.

In America's other tropical paradise, in the teeming boulevards of Miami and the quirky streets of Key West, novelists have made Florida the murder mystery capital of the world. John D. MacDonald, whose Travis McGee plied his trade in Key West in dozens of books, is long gone, but his legacy lives on.

While writers are minting characters in nearly every big city for every crime, it is on the coastal bookends of America where the ghosts and stepchildren of Chandler and MacDonald live.

``More and more publishers are trying first-time authors for mysteries. Just look in your bookstore,'' says Audrey Moore, owner and operator of Mysteries to Die For, a book shop in Thousand Oaks.

``Mysteries are very, very popular now, and they are read now everywhere in many different countries. You just can't imagine. But it seems more come out of Florida and California. There's a wonderful mystique about Los Angeles and also Florida. They both have their own intoxicating lure.''

That lure has drawn many a new voice to what is a very competitive and, these days anyway, lucrative market. Saniford, Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, James Hall, Laurence Shames, Lawrence Sanders, Charles Williford and Randy Wayne White lead a slew of critically praised mystery writers spinning tales of crime and deceit from South Miami to the Keys.

``It's an attractive setting,'' says Hiaasen, who authored ``Striptease,'' the coming film starring Demi Moore.

``You have the tropical beauty, but you also get the sleaze, corruption and violence that we crime writers know and love. In a way, that, and the uncertain nature of things, makes it similar to Los Angeles,'' said Hiaasen, who was born and raised in Florida and works as a columnist for the Miami Herald.

O'Sullivan has been tracking the rise of the Florida crime novel, a phenomenon he and others agree got its impetus from Hiaasen's satirical tales of Florida's quirky underbelly. He and others say the new immigrant population from Cuba and South America, the rapid rise in population, and the problems associated with both make the Sunshine State a unique setting for the macabre.

O'Sullivans says that there are about 350 authors writing mysteries in the Sunshine State now, and in the last 10 years he counts more than 100 crime novels set in Florida that have been published.

He finds this all hardly surprising.

``New writers seem to pop up every day,'' he says. ``Florida, like Los Angeles, attracts people from other places. So, there really is a lack of history here. People who have been here for two generations think of themselves as long established. There are all those things that come with it, like shady real estate deals, corrupt politicians and, of course, the mob, many of whom just come here for the weather.''

Mysteries are so popular and so profitable there, that Tropic, the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, published an ongoing mystery serial where different well-known writers contributed a chapter over a series of weeks. Afterward, a publisher paid $200,000 to turn it into a book.

``Can you imagine?'' says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edna Buchanan, whose protagonist, big-city Miami crime reporter Britt Montero, is of partial Cuban descent. She contributed one of the chapters of the serial.

``We all donated our shares to charity, but I think there isn't a one of us who will say they aren't surprised that someone wanted to pay so much for it. It just shows how big the market is,'' Buchanan says.

This is a fact not lost on major publishers in either place. Here in Los Angeles, writers Walter Mosley, Jan Burke, Michael Connelly, Thomas Perry, T. Jefferson Parker, Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich, April Smith and Robert Crais have been among the more prominent crime novelists, and scores more are touted as the next coming.

Like many of his colleagues, Crais crisscrosses the country each year with book in hand, smile on face and pen at the ready. His publisher, Hyperion, has made him its No. 1 author, period, hoping the long-struggling novelist will turn into the next Ross Macdonald. It helps that Crais, whose detective Elvis Cole tramps the streets of Southern California - even venturing over to the San Fernando Valley every once in a while - is a hot talent writing about an even hotter place.

``Publishers are really stupid in a way,'' says Jim Huang, who since 1982 has published the Drude Review, a newsletter that reviews and previews mystery fiction. ``One book does well in a certain region, and all of the sudden a bunch of imitators follow. Carl Hiaasen writes about Florida and then everyone decides they need a Florida novel. It's all part of the regionalization of mysteries. It's not just England or L.A. anymore.''

Even so, many of the dozen or so writers interviewed for this story say other factors led them to set their novels either in Los Angeles or Florida. Indeed, the two sunny paradises seemed to share many similarities in their roles as background characters, and the most compelling theme is their singularness on the American landscape.

Crais believes in L.A. as a unique kind of destination for Americans.

``Los Angeles is a place for dreams and dreamers,'' says the former television writer, who lives in Sherman Oaks. ``I came here from Louisiana because I wanted to pursue writing a novel. People come here to pursue their dreams. I mean no offense to Cleveland, but people don't say, `I want to go to Cleveland when I grow up.' Except for maybe New York, there isn't any other place like it.''

Chandler and Ross Macdonald were drawn to a different L.A., a new town of questionable morals and almost no history - not of the white man, anyway. Hollywood was young and secrets were still tucked away in the bottom drawer of someone's chifforobe. Justice was meted out on the street by tough, no-nonsense flatfoots who spoke softly and carried big guns.

The city has changed. Today's L.A. can be a violent place, strained by its ethnic differences, distrust for authority, too much smog and traffic and natural disasters. It has given writers a new take on the dark inspiration that influenced their predecessors.

``Everyone who lives here knows the `Big One' could happen at this very moment, right now, right where we are standing,'' said Michael Connelly who as one of the country's rising crime writers has won awards for his series featuring L.A. detective Harry Bosch.

``Here we are in this, well, paradise, but with all this potential for violence and natural disaster. The whole place is a few seconds from turning into rubble. When you have a city of people living on the edge like that, strange things happen.''

April Smith, whose gritty ``North of Montana,'' was published to critical raves last year, likes writing about a place that teeters on the brink of chaos. It is, she says, what makes the City of Angels a perfect setting for crime novels.

``It never occurred to me to write about anyplace else,'' said Smith, who is at work on her second novel, also set in Los Angeles. ``I think there's a unique tension here between the passive and the disaster. Everyone is right on the razor's edge. That's very dramatic. Part of the allure of a main character is the certain kind of courage it takes to walk that line ... to embrace it. And maybe even to figure some of it out.''

CAPTION(S):

17 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) CRIME & PALM TREES

John McCoy/ Daily News

(2) Walter Mosley

(3) Robert Crais at his Sherman Oaks home.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News

(4) Faye Kellerman

(5) Michael Connelly

David Sprague/Daily News

(6) Les Saniford

(7) Edna Buchanan

(8) James Hall

(9) Laurence Shames

(10) Carl Hiaasen

(11--17) no caption (Book covers)