Bookends

THE SPY WORE RED

by Aline, Countess of Romanones

Random House; 304 pages; $18.95

The cloak was by Balenciaga; the dagger could come from anyone -- a bullfighter, a bellboy, a ballroom dancing partner. During World War II, Aline, Countess of Romanones lived a life of glamour and danger that Ingrid Bergman only played at in Notorious. Born Aline Griffith in Pearl River, N.Y., the former Manhattan model joined the Office of Strategic Services and was posted to Madrid in 1944, where she decoded messages at the American Oil Mission. The OSS called her Tiger. Her orders: to flush out Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler's special agent in the Spanish capital. The dark, lissome beauty moved easily in international society. Her front line was frequently a receiving line or a table at Horcher's, a restaurant transplanted from Berlin.

The Spy Wore Red presents this unusual theater of war in compact scenes and entertaining dialogue. Says a matador out to impress the author with his knowledge of local history: "This is where the famous bandit Luis Candelas used to hide, Aline. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor -- just like your Robin Hat." The grim side of the job includes treachery and murder. To escape death at the hands of a Nazi strangler, Aline must shoot to kill. There are two happy endings to her story. She reduces the list of possible Himmler agents to a German countess, and lengthens her name by marrying a Spanish nobleman, Luis Figuera y Perez de Guzman el Bueno.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF SIDD FINCH

by George Plimpton

Macmillan; 275 pages; $14.95

George Plimpton is most widely known as the lean and rumpled patrician who trained with the Detroit Lions and then shared that male fantasy with football fans in his best-selling Paper Lion. Now, in The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, Plimpton indulges the fantasy that he is a novelist. The book, which began as a benign hoax in the April 1, 1985, issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, is based on a charming conceit: a narrator suffering from writer's block tells the story of Sidd Finch, a British-born Buddhist-trained monk who can throw a baseball 168 m.p.h with unfailing accuracy. Sidd, short for Siddhartha, joins the New York Mets in spring training and hooks up with Debbie Sue, a Florida beachgirl and playmate of porpoises. Plimpton employs real Mets as characters, digresses into baseball lore, horn playing, Zen and the art of pitching, and the emotional state of the narrator. It is all gracefully done but tends to take the reader's eye off the ball, or rather the fact that there is not much ball. An agreeably plotless pastime, Sidd Finch should appeal to minor league mystics.

DEBUTANTE: THE STORY OF BRENDA FRAZIER

by Gioia Diliberto

Knopf; 332 pages; $19.95

If Brenda Frazier was not the richest or the most beautiful girl in '30s America, she came close enough. She was the glittering symbol of privilege and glamour; her picture made the cover of LIFE; women imitated her Kabuki-like look, with a complexion evoking Colette's description of "milk in shadow." Brenda was seen with notables from Errol Flynn to Cardinal Spellman to Irving Berlin. But obscurity overtook her, and in later years she viewed her life as a cosmic joke: she had become one of the most famous people in the nation simply because of a debutante party. She repudiated her promiscuous mother and grandmother, both coarse social climbers who married for money, and retreated into reclusiveness, alcoholism and drug addiction. Alas, the poor little rich girl is now an American cliche, but Gioia Diliberto's carefully researched portrait offers a wealth of revealing social history.

MISERY

by Stephen King

Viking; 310 pages; $18.95

A devoted fan and a merciless editor can each make harsh demands on a writer. For Novelist Paul Sheldon, Stephen King's protagonist, both are lumped together in Annie Wilkes, "a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen." Trapped in Annie's house, Sheldon finds her a skilled practitioner with ax and carving knife who wants to cut his body as well as his prose. He is forced to write, just for her, another in his series featuring Misery Chastain, darling of supermarket bookracks. At first playing Scheherazade to her, he ends up playing Scheherazade to himself: he will not try to get away until he knows how it all comes out. But then his imagination fires up. The old proverb may have said that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, he reflects, "but Ronson Fast-Lite had yet to be invented." King's fans will relish the book's gore (oozing, splattering, spraying), and his editor will no doubt be ecstatic about its sales (climbing, surging, exploding).