Henrietta Hay's Column

Discussion over the coffee cups recently turned to the books we read when we were little girls.

My friend the philosopher read just about everything in print, from cereal boxes to encyclopedias. Another friend grew up in a very small town in Montana, where the reading material consisted of two waist high bookcases in the one room school. I really can't remember too much of what I read when I was ten, but I want to reassure my young friends that it was after the invention of movable type.

The literary love of my very young life was Mary Jane. Mary Jane was an early version of Nancy Drew, and she too solved a whole series of mysteries. She lived in Boston and loved to ride on the pedal-driven swan boats on the lagoon in the Public Garden. Many years later when I finally got to Boston I rode on a swan boat before I saw the liberty bell.

And three quarters of a century later I am still a mystery fan.

Although reading mysteries is not usually considered an intellectual activity, a devoted reader like me does actually pick up a lot of miscellaneous knowledge. I would never read a technical book on fox hunting, but Riding Shotgun made me think I could actually chase that fox.

That's the title of Rita Mae Brown's new novel. It is set in the horse country of Virginia, and includes a modern foxhunt, and one that took place in 1699. There is remarkably little difference.

Cig is Master of the Jefferson Hunt. The fox, the 30 hounds, the beautiful horses and the hunters in their scarlet coats all come alive. But on the day of the hunt, in a dense fog, Cig follows the bushy tailed fox named Fattail into a time warp and ends up in 1699 and a much more serene life. Fattail eventually leads her back into the 20th century. As always, Brown's characters are wonderfully real, warm and funny. And her love of horses makes me want to climb on one again and head for the nearest fox hunt.

Nevada Barr has a new adventure for Anna Pigeon, park ranger, in Firestorm. This one is a little too close to home, for it involves a treacherous forest fire called the Jackknife. Set in Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, Anna is the medic and security officer of a fire fighting crew. With a fire almost under control and rain and snow forecast, most of the crew is demobilized. Anna and several others stay behind to care for a man with a broken leg when a firestorm suddenly explodes. The group takes shelter in the special tents irreverently called "shake 'n 'bakes." When the fire passes, everyone has survived except one crewmember who has a knife in his back. This one seems insoluble, but the intrepid park ranger figures out whodunnit.

Lilly Bennett is back in Marne Davis Kellogg's Curtsey. This mystery continues the adventures of Lilly Bennett, ex-chief of the Santa Bianca Police Department, now running her private security firm out of her ranch in Roundup, Wyoming, where she is also a U. S. Marshal. She is an extremely rich free spirit who says what she thinks. "Westerners can be anywhere or come from anywhere. It's a state of mind.... That's what I think, anyway. I am Lilly Bennett, westerner, in case you wondered." No one wonders. No fiendish murderer can escape her eagle eye, sharp brain, tart tongue and amusingly skewed view of the human race.

Kellogg, a fifth generation westerner, lives in Denver. Post Reviewer Maureen Harrington says, "Boy, howdy, there's nothing more annoying than an angel-faced ex-deb with writing talent...That Kellogg. She's Miss Manners with a bad streak. Trolloppe in the West." That's Lilly Bennett, too.

And if the temperature gets too high, there is Sue Henry's latest. She's the one who wrote Murder on the Iditarod Trail. Her new mystery, Termination Dust, takes place in the Yukon where, at 30 below, the snow turns to icy pellets that "flow across the ice like sand." That will cool you off.

Lazy summer days and a good supply of brand new mysteries. Ah, bliss!