DATE: Sunday, September 14, 1997            TAG: 9709060623

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

EVER TOUGH, BENNETT IS BACK

Lilly Bennett is not your father's U.S. marshal.

Pushing 50, she packs a fresh face lift, upholstered curves and a 9mm Glock pistol in her black patent-leather purse.

She's a crack skeet shot, prefers Jameson's on the rocks and admits to being ``devastated'' more than once by marriage.

But only by husbands who weren't her own.

Bennett spent 20 years rising through the ranks of the Santa Bianca Police Department to become chief of detectives.

``But,'' she explains, ``the wife of the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court caught me and her beloved in bed together and (I) decided it would just be a lot easier to head on back to the ranch than have her sell the videos to Maury Povich.''

So the professed ``rock-ribbed Episcopalean'' and ``adrenaline addict'' returned to the family owned Circle B in Roundup, Wyo., to take the marshal's job and run Bennett Security International, where she drives a Jeep across Crazy Squaw Canyon at 95 mph with Beatles tapes blaring and Baby, her wire-haired fox terrier, balanced on top of the seat behind her.

``I suspect everybody,'' she says, as well she might.

The irrepressible and irresistible Bennett has starred in two irreverent mystery novels, Bad Manners and Curtsey, and here comes the third: Tramp (Doubleday, 255 pp., $21.95).

These hip, flip exercises in criminal activity are all by Marne Davis Kellogg, a fifth-generation Westerner who divides her time between Norfolk and Denver. The author will appear in person Thursday night from 7 to 8 at Barnes & Noble in Virginia Beach to read from and sign her books.

Kellogg, 51, once took a writing course from former ODU professor Wayne Ude, who advised her to write in the first person. ``It changed my life,'' she reports from her Colorado home. Is she Lilly?

``Lilly,'' Kellogg says, ``is a lot richer.''

I like middle-aged, been-around Bennett because she's not just another Barbie with a bullet.

I also like her because she's no predictable feminist ideologue, either.

``What's all this sister deal, anyhow?'' muses the marshal. ``Other than a propagandized attempt at imposing a guilt trip? At least 50 percent of the world's population is female, and believe me, ladies, they may be your sisters, but they aren't mine, and I don't consider their plight my own just because we are of the same gender.

``Sorry.''

And pass the canapes, please.

Bennett's madcap murder cases are delightful, laugh-wrapped throwbacks to the '30s and '40s when screwball mysteries were unabashed amusements in the hands of master entertainers like Craig Rice (who was a woman) and Stuart Palmer (who wasn't).

Tramp records what happens when disagreeable nonagenarian Cyrus Vaile, sponsor of the Roundup Repertory Company, bites a Vienna sausage and the dust at his birthday bash. The Rep has been producing ``the Scottish Play,'' Macbeth, which, as every theater fan knows, always engenders all sorts of bad luck backstage. That's confirmed at another cocktail party, where a groupie gets poisoned by a mushroom tamale.

Then somebody drops the catwalk and lighting rig on an actor and the artistic director.

And, in the course of things, a pyrotechnic attempt is made to lock Lilly up and crisp her down to a designer pork rind.

In evidence are a mysteriously disappeared $20 million endowment, a rip-snorting rodeo rehearsal and a Maureen O'Hara lookalike named Gigi Dorrance-Downs, who mouths Frenchisms like ``Je ne sais pas de deux.''

Plus a ton and a half of gold bullion beneath the guest-room bed (but not for long).

And an assortment of colorful show-biz types, mercilessly x-rayed by Bennett's unfooled first-person eyeball - like extra-wealthy, extra conservative old biddy Maude Ballentine:

``Her life,'' the narrator notes, ``consisted of going around from one board meeting to another, throwing cold water on good ideas.''

Clearly Davis, like her protagonist, has been about and observed well.

Marshal Bennett is Auntie Mame with a license to carry. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu