MURDER AND MAYHEM, FROM N.Y. TO L.A.

Byline: Fred Shuster Daily News Staff Writer

``Manhattan Nocturne'' by Colin Harrison (Crown; $24) Three Stars

As a columnist for a New York City tabloid, Porter Wren scrambles from one gory crime scene to the next. In ``Manhattan Nocturne,'' a noir novel that brings to mind the work of Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson, Wren is approached by the quintessential mysterious blonde at a posh party, who lures him into solving the murder of her filmmaker husband. A tiny piece of jade even figures into the plot.

Author Colin Harrison, deputy editor of Harper's magazine, does a nice job with the sometimes predictable twists and turns of his story, especially bringing to life the character of Wren's wife, Lisa, a hand surgeon whose descriptions of her job are not for the squeamish. Also not for the faint of heart are the grotesque final hours of Caroline Crowley's husband's life.

An above-average page-turner.

``Last Gang in Town'' by Marcus Gray (Henry Holt; $25) Four Stars

British music journalist Marcus Gray has come up with the first critical biography of the Clash, the London punk band whose self-perpetuated myth far outdistanced the truth.

The band was close to Gray's heart, so he takes it rather personally when discovering, for example, that the famous first meeting of Clash songwriting partners Joe Strummer and Mick Jones did not occur by chance on the streets of Ladbroke Grove. In fact, Strummer was poached from another group by the Clash's Sevengali-like manager, Bernie Rhodes, who was trying to put together a rebel-rock band to follow the Sex Pistols into the nation's tabloids.

``Last Gang in Town'' is a sturdy piece of investigative work, but not without humor. At one point in the story, Strummer, already a rock star, was so concerned about street credibility that he left his comfortable apartment and returned to live in a crowded London squat. Things like that mattered then.

``Trainspotting'' by Irvine Welsh (Norton; $13) Four Stars

The book came first, and it's far superior to the film.

It's also much funnier, although it takes a few pages to get used to the thick Scottish dialect author Irvine Welsh employs throughout his story of a group of wordy and profane Edinburgh junkies, street thugs and generic loonies.

The characters and many of the situations in ``Trainspotting'' will be familiar to those who saw the movie, but the dialogue here is much livelier.

And for those who need it, a five-page glossary defines such Scottish phrases as bevvy (drink), brassic (broke), coffin-dodger (senior citizen) and dosh (money).

``Rock Bottom'' by Pamela Des Barres (St. Martin's Press; $24.95) One Star

Not every rock writer can begin a chapter with: ``When I was a teen-age nymphet hanging on the arm of Jimmy Page ...''

Pamela Des Barres can because she's made a career of telling all about her groupie days in the '70s. In ``Rock Bottom,'' subtitled ``Dark Moments in Music Babylon,'' she relates the stories behind the deaths of rock stars Marc Bolan, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Sam Cooke, Johnny Thunders and others in a light, offensively breezy tone.

Des Barres, who apparently just rewrote news and magazine reports here, adds nothing to what we already know of her subjects. To make matters worse, her writing style is cringe-inducing. (``He wasn't called the Killer for nothing.'')

``Unnatural Disasters: Recent Writings From the Golden State'' edited by Nicole Panter (Incommunicado Press; $15) Four Stars

Nicole Panter describes California of the late '90s as ``an overdeveloped, strip-malled, riot/rebellion-torn, earthquake-stricken, stress-plagued, burnt-out, tapped-out, broken-down ... post-boom locale formerly known as Paradise.''

So, what else is new?

In ``Unnatural Disasters,'' teacher-artist Panter compiles 24 dispatches from this sun-kissed urban wasteland to almost numbing effect. Many of these short stories and essays are superb, among them Bernard Cooper's ``Burl's,'' in which an 8-year-old boy's sense of the world is forever altered when two transvestites walk by the Hollywood restaurant where he and his parents are eating lunch.

Another goodie is musician Dave Alvin's ``A Prayer for Los Angeles,'' a sort of litany of what has been lost.

``Unnatural Disasters'' is a confirmed success.

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Photo: (1--3) no caption (Book covers - Manhattan Noctur ne, Last Gang in Town, Rock Bottom)