Let’s start at the very end: The postscript of Stephen King’s “On Writing” contains some of the most harrowing pages he has ever written. It’s here that King describes the traffic accident that nearly killed him in June 1999. Writing with understated simplicity, he takes us through the awful sequence of events, from the moment he was struck by a van near his home in Maine, through his emergency medical treatment and long rehabilitation, to the moment he sat down at a typewriter and, in agonizing pain, began writing again. The result is like a reality-based version of his novel “Misery,” distilled to short-story length, with an angel (King’s wife, Tabitha) rather than a devil (the novel’s psychotic Annie Wilkes) playing the part of nurse.

“On Living: A Postscript” is an extraordinary document. What it’s doing at the end of this otherwise dullish primer on the craft of writing is anybody’s guess. Maybe after spending 150 pages on the dry mechanical rules of good prose (“The adverb is not your friend,” etc.), King wanted to give us an example of the straightforward but powerful brand of storytelling we should be aiming for. As the novelist explains, good writers don’t tell; they show. And while that old saw is as rusty as they come, it still slices to the bone, as King demonstrates to great effect in his postscript.

But, alas, there’s all that telling to slog through beforehand. King’s advice to writers is generally sound, and he delivers it with refreshing irreverence, but nothing can disguise the fact that nearly all of it is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times before. His harangue against the passive voice, for instance, is hardly news that will stop the presses. Likewise his recommendation that writers avoid overly elaborate vocabulary. And do we really need the best horror novelist in our language to remind us that “nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing”? At times I felt as if I were reading the literary equivalent of a home fix-it guide by Frank Lloyd Wright.

What I (and probably a lot of other King fans) hoped to find in “On Writing” was something a little meatier. For me, King’s most remarkable talent is his ability to magnify and dramatize the ordinary fears that lie at the root of everyday life. As a writer and as a reader, I wanted to know how he gains access to all of those dark, cobwebby places in human nature. Granted, such things are notoriously difficult to talk about — most writers hate to be asked where they get their ideas — but I would have welcomed more insight into how a writer like King translates his own obsessions and neuroses into compelling fiction.

We get hints of that juicier information in the book’s first section, “C.V.,” where King tells us a little about his life as a writer. Literary gossipmongers can look here for details of King’s past alcohol and drug addictions: “At the end of my adventures I was drinking a case of sixteen-ounce tallboys a night, and there’s one novel, ‘Cujo,’ that I barely remember writing at all.” But novice writers would do better to study the kinds of life experiences that shaped King as a horror chronicler (like his childhood visits to the ear doctor, who would — eew! — puncture the boy’s eardrum with a long needle to drain away the blood-tinged pus).

“I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin,” King explains at one point in the book. This is a revealing statement, and one that goes to the heart of what makes him a unique presence in contemporary American fiction. But in this “memoir of the craft,” he doesn’t really explore those deeper connections between self and story. “On Writing” would have been a far more memorable book if it had focused on King’s love of the night rather than his love of the deleted adverb.

The grand pageant of Chinese history has featured its share of notorious women — most notably the empress dowager Tz’u Hsi, who used to dispatch eunuchs to assassinate her enemies — but few have been as widely despised as Jiang Ching, the dreaded Madame Mao. Known to detractors as the “White-Boned Demon,” she was responsible for some of the worst ideological excesses of the early Communist years, using her position as the chairman’s wife to wreak vengeance upon anyone who had ever slighted her during her early career as actress, gold digger and political climber. For many people both inside and outside China, she epitomizes the arbitrariness and vindictiveness that have plagued the Chinese Communist Party throughout its history. That’s why few mourned when, shortly after Mao Tse-tung’s death in 1976, she was tried as a member of the hated Gang of Four and imprisoned for the rest of her life.

Jim Crace’s new novel starts off like a genre mystery, with the savage murder of two middle-aged lovers on a remote and windswept beach. But anyone looking for the traditional mystery plot line — that old reassuring journey from crime to detection to punishment — is reading the wrong book. Instead, “Being Dead” takes off on a more eccentric course, swerving backward and forward in time in order to put these two deaths in context. The result is an odd, gorgeously written but curiously abstract novel that’s easier to respect than to love.

Joseph and Celice, the unprepossessing zoologists who find themselves in the condition described by the book’s title, are not the kind of married couple you’d expect to see on the beach doing anything other than collecting sea-cricket specimens. But on an impromptu visit to Baritone Bay, where they met 30 years before, they take a short, nostalgic detour: “They had made love for the first time in these same dunes. And they might have made love there again if, as the newspapers were to say, ‘Death, armed with a piece of granite, had not stumbled on their kisses.’” Discovered in flagrante delicto by a mentally deficient miscreant, the two are heartlessly bludgeoned and left to die — “traduced, spread-eagled and absurd” — in the sand.

Crace takes this violent ending as a beginning. Using as his model a funeral ritual he calls a “quivering” (during which neighbors and relatives reminisce about the dead, starting with the most recent memories), he proceeds to “upend the hourglass of Celice and Joseph’s life together.” Working backward from the murder, he relates in reverse order the mundane events of the day that led up to their final moments on Baritone Bay. At the same time, he reconstructs their lives in the other direction, from the time of their first meeting. These two thematic lines, along with a third involving their daughter’s reactions during the six days between their disappearance and their discovery by police, intertwine in a kind of narrative fugue, spun out in chantlike prose that often takes on the measured rhythms of blank verse.

But there is a fourth line to this fugue — an ostinato played by nature itself. As Joseph liked to say to his students, “Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves, humankind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology.” With this thought in mind, Crace also describes the purely physical changes that Joseph and Celice undergo during their six days in the dunes, as the forces of nature have their say: “Again the crabs and rodents went to work, while there was light, flippantly browsing Joseph and Celice, frisking them for moisture and for food, delving in their pits and caverns for their treats, and paying them as scant regard as cows might pay a turnip head.”

Readers prone to queasiness might want to skip a few sections here (as when “the flies lined up like fishermen along the banks of the bodies’ open wounds”). But it’s this last element of Crace’s strange eulogy that ends up being the most interesting aspect of the novel. As characters, Joseph and Celice are a little difficult to take — prickly, small-spirited, almost willfully unsympathetic. But by placing their lives and obscene deaths in the context of the larger natural processes of decay and regeneration, Crace allows the couple a measure of redemptive grace, something that might have proved impossible in a more conventional narrative. And so in “Being Dead” he pulls off a remarkable bit of legerdemain, combining various unappealing parts into a whole that somehow — despite those descriptions of oozing, gull-pecked, maggot-infested wounds — achieves a rough, uncompromising beauty.

Overcoming early weakness sparked by fluctuating interest rates, political futures rallied to a mixed close last week in heavy trading. The Democrat 2000 Index eked out a small gain while the Republican New Millennium Index, hurt by a steep decline in shares of McCain Technologies, edged lower. Meanwhile, the Reform Party Over-the-Counter Penny-Stock Index sank to a 52-week low, amid continuing skepticism over the viability of some of its leading issues.

It was a particularly good week for the large-capitalization stocks. GWB Pharmaceuticals and Entertainment reversed some of its recent losses, helped by a growing perception that the company’s commanding market share might enable it to withstand the challenge of less well-positioned competitors. Analysts, however, were not universally optimistic about the stock. Pointing to the recent debacle in shares of Forbes Aerospace, they speculated that large caps like GWB may be relying too heavily on current cash flow at the expense of innovative R&D initiatives, leading some to suggest that the stock may be overvalued at current levels.

A detective with Tourette’s syndrome narrates a hard-boiled crime novel. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Another in the endless line of diversity dicks — sleuths in wheelchairs, lesbian lieutenants, investigators who also happen to be heroin addicts or restaurant critics or codgers as old as Angela Lansbury. But Lionel Essrog, the twitching, barking, gabbling narrator of Jonathan Lethem’s new novel, “Motherless Brooklyn,” is no movie-of-the-week novelty grafted onto a noir mystery. Maybe his Tourette’s is a gimmick, but it’s a gimmick with depth, with soul. Lethem, after all, walks the serious-fiction beat, and in his hands the compulsions of Tourette’s become a kind of kaleidoscopic metaphor, ultimately (and somewhat paradoxically) reflecting the fundamental ethos of the mystery genre itself: the compulsion to restore order and rightness to a world thrown temporarily out of joint.

The world of “Motherless Brooklyn” is, of course, the borough of the title, and what disrupts its sense of order is the stabbing death of a small-time neighborhood operator named Frank Minna. Lionel is Frank’s factotum, one of four misfits from a local orphanage Frank has commandeered to work in his seedy and makeshift detective agency. Calling themselves Minna Men, the four have become vassals in Frank’s scruffy little fiefdom, and like the members of any feudal hierarchy, each has found his particular niche: Tony is the implicit second-in-command, the lesser noble to Frank’s lord of the manor; Danny is the enigmatic knight-errant, distant and of uncertain loyalty; Gilbert is the earthy, none too intelligent serf; and Lionel, nicknamed Freakshow because of his constant verbal tics and physical twitches, is the fool, the court jester, whose antics the others tolerate with the indulgence that forced proximity dictates.

With Frank’s murder, this miniature fiefdom loses its suzerain, and in the scramble to find the killer, long-submerged tensions begin to pull the Minna Men apart. (Think Yugoslavia after Tito, or the Bowery Boys without Leo Gorcey to keep them all in line.) As Frank’s deputy, Tony tries to control the investigation, but Lionel has his own reasons — some of them Tourette’s-related — for getting to the bottom of Frank’s murder: “My words begin plucking at the threads nervously, seeking purchase, a weak point …” In a sense, this is detective work as medical condition, stemming from a pathological need to poke at experience, to process its patterns, “putting hairs in place, putting ducks in rows, replacing divots.”

What follows is a fairly standard noir quest: a long, convoluted road to discovery, littered with the usual detritus of fractured conspiracies, and complete with corpses, cutthroats and big, ugly men with big, ugly guns. But as in his earlier novels (“As She Climbed Across the Table,” “Girl in Landscape”), Lethem harnesses the engine of a familiar genre to transport us to a territory uniquely his own. It comes as no surprise that he uses Tourette’s as an excuse for some heady verbal pyrotechnics. (My favorite Essrog riff: “He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse.”) More unexpected is the sympathetic warmth he brings to the characterization of Lionel. “Motherless Brooklyn” has a few problems — including some cartoonlike stock characters and one scene near the end that flirts with maudlin sentimentality — but it works far better than the average hip postmodern novel in terms of sheer emotional impact. Because Lethem never lets the metaphorical and linguistic possibilities of his narrator’s illness overshadow his immensely appealing humanity, we really care about Lionel and his search for his mentor’s killer.

In the end, the mystery at the heart of “Motherless Brooklyn” turns out to be surprisingly modest. Readers looking for one of Don DeLillo’s or Thomas Pynchon’s grand metaphysical conspiracies may be disappointed. But really, Lethem is too inventive a writer to produce just another literature-of-paranoia knockoff, with Tourette’s as its central trope (“The Barking of Lot 49″?). Instead, he’s given us something that is at once less derivative and more traditional: a detective story that transcends its pulp roots not by adopting high-art pretensions but by bringing to the genre an originality and an idiosyncratic sympathy that few other writers could muster.

“I daily hear such reports of advantages to be gaind by one project or other in the Stocks, that my Spirit is Up with double Zeal, in the desire of our trying to enrich ourselves.”

Sound familiar? It should, given the zealous high spirits of those enriched by “the Stocks” of Wall Street over the past few years. But the author of the above sentiment was Alexander Pope, the British poet, and he was writing about a different bull market — that of South Sea Company stock in 1720. As Edward Chancellor points out in his fascinating and frightening new book, “Devil Take the Hindmost,” all of London was caught up in the mania for South Sea stock, which was appreciating at a rate even early holders of Amazon.com would envy. Pope’s contemporary Jonathan Swift probably described the era best: “I have enquired of some that have come from London, what is the religion there? they tell me it is South Sea stock.”