T Jefferson Parker

Nellie Reeves and Eric Strutt were in top form, as usual, at the Friends of the UCI Library's annual meeting. Reeves' generosity to aspiring student writers has been unflagging for the last 15 years. At last Monday's meeting at the Sherman Gardens it was even more so--$250 more so. Usually six finalists in the student essay contest are awarded $250 each, provided by Reeves of Balboa Island. This year Strutt and his judges arrived at a tie vote, making seven winning essays out of a field of 20.

Writer T. Jefferson Parker suggests that an interview take place in San Clemente, at a restaurant on the pier with a view of surfers who are riding the waves with the languid grace of dolphins. This Orange County beach community, which conjures up images of former President Nixon running his metal detector over the sand, is the perfect spot to talk about Parker's recently published book--his ninth--a soulful police procedural titled "Red Light" (Hyperion).

DR. ARNOLD O. BECKMAN: Scientist, philanthropist and founder of Beckman Instruments in Fullerton, lives in Corona del Mar. I live on a bluff over the ocean in Corona del Mar just east of the Newport Harbor jetty. I looked down (Friday) morning and the oil hadn't gotten there yet. I'm apprehensive we may have a period here in which our shoreline will be spoiled. It is just too bad. We have to do some heavy thinking to anticipate these things.

Iron River A Novel T. Jefferson Parker Dutton: 374 pp., $26.95

When the keen observer gets three Christmas presents that are all basically for the same purpose, he can't help but detect an implied message. When the gifts come from people very important in the observer's life, the message is magnified, often displayed in bright neon, and demands reflection.

When it comes to the crime-based fiction that long has played such an important role in the literary life of Los Angeles, we're living through what amounts to a golden age. The dark ecstasies of James Ellroy, Michael Connelly's artful probing of the inner monologue, Joe Wambaugh's explorations of black comedy as morality play, Walter Mosley's blend of empathy and formal ambition and T. Jefferson Parker's propulsive but pitch-perfect works of...

MAYBE the California crime novel had nowhere else to go. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald established its hard-boiled style, which a thousand imitators turned into a collection of cliches. Then James Ellroy went way beyond hard-boiled, to blackened and smoking at the bottom of a bone-dry saucepan. Nobody could beat that, so when T.

The 12th novel of T. Jefferson Parker, clearly his most ambitious, covers 50 years in the lives of the surviving Becker brothers of Tustin -- the dogged homicide detective Nick, crime reporter and budding novelist Andy, and David, the man of God. (A fourth sibling, Carl, is a Vietnam casualty.) It meticulously tracks their loss of youth and innocence while observing the changes, none for the better, that have taken place in what was once an easygoing, fruitful conservative paradise.