Die Cool

LOOKING FOR

CHET BAKER

By Bill Moody.

253 pp. New York:

Walker & Company. $24.95.

Jazz and detective fiction have been linked almost since the days of hard-boiled pulps, and their relationship deepened once film noir set it to soundtracks. Some of the spark between the two is the stuff of genre: jazz as the dangerous sound of the other side of the tracks was part of the atmosphere private dicks moved through on the margins of America.

Bill Moody has taken the next step, creating a jazz pianist-sleuth named Evan Horne. A Berklee-trained musician, Horne packs a piano player's curiosity about and thirst for harmony -- in jazz terms, possible scenarios for a melody and musical arrangement. Like a hero out of Hitchcock, he is drawn, usually against his will, into amateur crime-solving -- in his case, crimes involving jazz. (In the wryly tongue-in-cheek ''Bird Lives,'' he helped the F.B.I. track a killer stalking smooth-jazz stars.) Once hooked, Horne translates his musical talents into investigative skills. Just as he would with a new piece of music, he focuses on the plot's key features, runs alternative variations to see how they play, eliminates extraneous elements and searches for coherence.

''Looking for Chet Baker'' is the fifth Horne novel, which says something about how good Moody is. A musician himself, Moody is a fluent writer with a good ear for dialogue, a deft and ingratiating descriptive touch, a talent for characterization and a genuine feel for the jazz world.

His antihero is white and vaguely middle-aged, smokes nonstop and is coming back from a hand injury that nearly ended his musical career. He also has his own ironic twist. As Fletcher Paige, the saxophone star who duets with Horne on and offstage, notes slyly: ''F.B.I. girlfriend, cop friend, ex gonna be a lawyer. Man, you the most law-enforcement-involved piano player I ever knew.''

In earlier novels, Horne's sidekick was a professor named Ace Buffington. A fan who aided Horne's musical comeback, Ace reflects jazz-milieu tensions between insiders and outsiders. In Moody's new novel, Ace is at the mystery's heart. While researching a biography of Chet Baker, he shows up in London, where Horne is gigging at Ronnie Scott's club. Ace sees his Baker book as the steppingstone to becoming chairman of his English department, but he needs Horne's help to get inside the jazz world. Horne refuses. But when Horne arrives in Amsterdam a few days later, he discovers Ace has disappeared -- from the same Amsterdam hotel Baker died in front of in 1988, after falling (did he jump or was he pushed?) from a window.

Horne's fears for his friend and his curiosity shift him into high gear once he finds Ace's research wedged behind the radiator of the hotel room where Ace stayed -- the room that was Baker's last. As Horne chases leads, he rings some standard P.I. changes -- withholding information from cops, getting set up and drugged by his quarry. All the while, Ace's mystery and Baker's become more entwined.

Moody works these story lines like a clever arranger setting two familiar melodies in unexpected counterpoint. Fletcher Paige helps make it swing. A 69-year-old veteran of the Count Basie band, Paige has moved to Europe, where his life is relatively free of racism and full of celebrity perks. A fan of hapless Hoke Moseley, hero of Charles Willeford's mysteries, Paige plays a street-smart but cautious Watson to Horne's Holmes. Their musical dynamics give rise to some of the book's most vibrant descriptions: ''I start a rubato introduction, letting the minor chords do the work through one out-of-tempo chorus. Then I start a vamp, in tempo, just beyond ballad speed. Fletcher slips in like he's parting a curtain, and just suddenly there, sliding into the melody, singing with his horn, catching everybody off guard with long, elegant lines, at times almost like cries, floating and lingering like billowy clouds in the air even after they're gone.''

Though its ''Long Goodbye'' denouement ties up loose ends a bit too neatly, ''Looking for Chet Baker'' is thoughtful entertainment. And like Baker's music, it is open to anyone -- no jazz-insider ID required.