shamus, shut up ______________Even a private eye can ____crack wise too often. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PLUM ISLAND BY NELSON DEMILLE WARNER BOOKS, 511 PAGES BY JON CARROLL | the wisecrack is to American culture what the bon mot is to British culture. Both are supposed to be amusing; both are aphoristic; both are a kind of protective posturing. The bon mot demonstrates how entirely at home within the culture the speaker is; it is designed to amuse a roomful of spectators. The wisecrack is the wit of the outsider; it is designed to amuse no one but himself. The wiseacre is a loner, contemptuous of his milieu, on the outside of the corrupt culture by choice. His wisecrack is an announcement of independence. American private eyes have often cracked wise. They weren't always funny -- Sam Spade may have been the most dour wise guy in popular fiction -- but they always had attitude, the cheap comic exterior that hid the heart of gold. (There was a female equivalent, the sidekick showgirl, or every role Eve Arden ever played). Archie Goodwin was the longest-running wisecrack show in classic detective fiction, and his smart remarks were amusing because they were unburdened by angst or subtext -- Goodwin, unlike Philip Marlowe, did not have a rich and melancholy inner life. The wisecrack has fallen into disfavor. Spenser has a smart mouth, but he's far too mannered and perfect to fit into the classic mold. He's an outsider not because he's irreverent, but because he's reverent about different things. Most modern fictional detectives are too burdened by seriousness of purpose -- and, of course, by the Nature of Evil -- to see much humor in anything. They gaze with unflinching eyes, they weep briefly, they kill the people who need to be killed. Then they go to the Bahamas. "Film noir this, shithead," the informed reader is tempted to yell. There are still funny books being written -- the wonderful Donald Westlake and the reliable Carl Hiasen are still working, praise be -- but their characters are, in general, far too dim and obsessed to achieve the ironic distance needed for a wisecrack. Which brings us to "Plum Island" by Nelson DeMille, this month's runaway bestseller. Plum Island the place has a brief but honorable literary history -- it's the federal facility to which Clarice Starling offered to send Hannibal Lecter in exchange for his cooperation in finding the serial killer Buffalo Bill. "One week a year you will walk on the beach, you will swim in the ocean, under supervision of course," she says. Lecter seems to be tempted and offers help. Later he discovers the tricks, and tells Starling: "Plum Island is Anthrax Island, Clarice. That was a lovely touch. Was it yours?" Plum Island is the real site of a secure Department of Agriculture lab on the tip of Long Island where (among other things) strains of the anthrax virus are kept. It is also the workplace of the couple whose murder sets off the hugger and mugger in "Plum Island." It should be said immediately that Nelson DeMille is no David Baldacci. His prose is competent and useful; his sentences make sense and appear to be arranged in the proper order; his metaphors are infrequent and, when presented, do not leap from boat deck to bird nest in the space of nine words. DeMille is an honest professional writer of airplane reading. His chase scenes are exciting; his women are appealing; his settings are interesting. His reach does not exceed his grasp, which is a desirable quality in short-reached fiction. His hero is a convalescing New York cop named John Corey. Corey is tough, smart, handy with a gun, disdainful of wine drinkers and BMW-drivers and he can see through bullshit as though by magic. He also cracks wise. His wisecracks consist of bad puns, sexist remarks, old jokes, mindless reverses and time-killing insults. The characters surrounding him don't like his jokes either, and in a different sort of book this might form the beginnings of story about a compulsive humorist -- Martin Amis might write a tiny masterpiece with that premise. But "Plum Island" is a genre novel. We desperately and completely want John Corey to shut up and grow up. We like him because there's no one else to like, and because we actually are curious as to who killed Tom and Judy Gordon, but after a time it's like fingernails on a blackboard. The dumb jokes become all that much more disgruntling because of the bloat that affects "Plum Island" as it does all summer books with aspirations to bestsellerdom. No one writes 70,000 tight words of lean investigative prose anymore, because you can't sell a book that small for $25. Besides, it might be a long plane trip; there might be an unscheduled stopover in Denver. The American reading public wants heft. Which means pages and pages of stuff drawn from brochures, journals, town histories and other source material -- DeMille thanks, profusely and early in the acknowledgments, Dan Starr of Research for Writers, NYC, and Dan's hand is everywhere. We'll be right back to the plot, but first, this thumbnail history of viticulture in eastern New York. Worked in "Les Miserables"; worked in "Moby Dick"; doesn't work in "Plum Island," because bloating a book is an art form in itself, and only two or three writers in any generation are up to the task. Mostly, it's like the air inside cereal boxes. "Plum Island" should come complete with a sticker that says "Warning: Contents May Have Settled During Shipping." Aug. 5,1997 MEDIA CIRCUS: The mysterious death of true-crime magazines - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - An excerpt from Plum Island ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM