The good guys in a Thomas novel are traditionally small-timers, outflanked in power and money by the big-timers they're going up against, who win by being the most cunning bastards they can be. But they're our bastards -- they waste no tears on the baddies whose fates are short, sharp and swift.

In the 1983 "Missionary Stew," the plot of which prefigures the Iran-Contra scandal, a pair of freelance American intelligence spooks is about to be executed for their part in propping up a Latin American military dictatorship. When they spot an American political fixer they know in the crowd of spectators and scream out for help, the fellow's response is to raise a Polaroid to take a shot of them getting what they so richly deserve. "Draper Haere took the film from the camera," Thomas writes. "He turned and walked away through the still-silent crowd. The film slowly developed. It turned out to be an excellent picture."

You get the feeling that, had anyone congratulated Thomas for the prescience he showed in "Missionary Stew," he would have shrugged it off and asked how it would be possible not to imagine that the sons of bitches in the Reagan White House would sink so low.

The political philosophy of Thomas' books is an amalgam of Lyndon B. Johnson and Leo Durocher. Thomas knew that in politics, nice guys finish last, and that good things are often accomplished by deal-making, wiliness, influence, blackmail and the sheer wielding of power. Those are not the qualities heralded by people who think politics should be the province of idealism. But it's nice to fantasize about the current crop of Democratic presidential candidates dipping into a Ross Thomas novel and perhaps being inspired to grow a pair.

The political skulduggery in "Briarpatch" begins with a cop, Felicity Dill, being blown up in her car. Her brother Ben, who works for a Senate subcommittee investigating corrupt business practices, returns to their hometown for the funeral and to find out who killed his sister. As is usually the case in a Thomas novel, the cast of second bananas, who range from the naive to the cynical, from the good-hearted to the lowlifes who exist in every social strata, have the loony individuality of the characters in a Preston Sturges movie.

Thomas, a master plotter who lets his stories unfold with the careful deliberation of a poker player waiting to lay down a winning hand, is a whiz at casual wisecracking American vernacular. Here's a veteran black waiter at a press club, prized for the abuse he doles out to members, giving it back to an old, shabby political reporter cadging a free steak and a shrimp cocktail: "You eat that shrimp, old man, and you're gonna be up around two or three reaching for the Gelusil like always ... One of these days I'm gonna serve you your chili-mac like you always eat, instead of that nice porterhouse you went and promoted yourself this evening, and you're gonna dip your spoon in it and shovel it into that big ugly mouth or yours and swallow it, and then your eyes're gonna bulge out like this, and you're gonna get all red in the face, even redder'n the drink's done made it, and then you're gonna keel over dead and guess who's gonna have to mop it all up? Me. That's who."

Those individual comic voices, the pleasurably nasty shocks the book has in store, Thomas' masterly plotting -- all of them could be the subject of an essay. Suffice it to say that few mystery writers, American or otherwise, have come anywhere near the savviness of Thomas, or his delight in the rhythms and attitude of everyday American speech (Joe Gores and Donald E. Westlake are two writers working in the same wised-up tradition). I doubt whether American publishing will bring any more joyful news this year than Ross Thomas being back in print. It should never be any other way.

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