Dixie City Jam.

Okay, Christmas books. Corny as it sounds, the older I get the more I believe that the true joy of Christmas lies in the receiving. Confess now: is there any feeling in the world like standing there in your bathrobe, 9 A.M., the tree blinking away loonily, the coffee and brandy within reach, opening packages filled with really good stuff? When - ever in your life - is gratification so damned licit?

So here are three books that are, purely and simply, really good stuff - which also means that they're the kind of stories that breathcatchingly renew your faith in the resilience of the imagination. They are: a detective novel, a science fiction novel, and a thing for which we have as yet no good name.

James Lee Burke's Dixie City Jam (Hyperion, $22.95, 367 pp.) is the latest in his series about Dave Robicheaux, and nails it down that Brother Burke is one of the very best fellows currently working in the great tradition of the American hard-boiled detective story. Robicheaux is a cop in the parish of New Iberia, Louisiana, a recovering drunk who's been fired from the New Orleans police department and who's trying to build a decent life with his fragile wife and their adopted daughter. Naturally, in book after book he finds himself drawn back into the byzantine, Berlinesque criminal scene in New Orleans (the most complicated city in America - no kidding), and gambling his own tensely maintained dignity against the riot of the Big Easy. In Dixie City Jam the plot involve a sunken submarine, sadistic neo-Nazis, a gangland feud, and a few neat torture scenes. But it also involves what I find most appealing about Burke's work, the insistence that in a violent and messy world we - that's we - must remain nonviolent, not messy, and sane. Detective fiction doesn't get much better than this. And Burke's descriptions of New Orleans are so bang-on that you can almost taste the gumbo.