Tales of the Wolf

Readers won't be surprised that each of these short stories appeared previously among explicit photos of naked women in Swank. In almost every episode, narrator ""Wolf'' Lannihan, an insurance investigator, takes a tumble with a well-endowed and/or leggy woman. Whether she's an innocent bystander or the crime's perpetrator matters not a jot to him. He's toughhard-boiled, hard-hitting and appallingly hard-drinking. Sanders (The Fourth Deadly Sin, etc.) has reworked these mildly diverting stories, originally published in the late 1960s, and added some topical references. But his sexist descriptions of women (``She was a little thing but well-machined with everything in abundance and in the right place'') and the pervasive ``cherchez la femme'' philosophya woman is usually at the bottom of the crimeroot the tales firmly in the past. (October)