``The most beautiful women in the world were African,'' begins Martin Cruz Smith's new novel, Rose; it is the opening to a passage that illuminates the passions of Jonathan Blair, gold mining engineer, African explorer, iconoclast, soon-to-be amateur detective and the protagonist of this literate and engaging historical mystery set, not in Africa, as it turns out, but in the British coal fields of the 1870s.

Blair, suffering from a recurrence of malaria and in disgrace over a misappropriation of funds during his latest foray among the tribes of the Gold Coast, has been summoned back to London from his beloved Africa by wealthy sponsor Bishop Hannay, whose family has held the vast coal fields of Wigan since the Middle Ages. In a scene redolent of those adventure films of yesteryear, Hannay meets Blair in the map room of The Royal Geographic Society and offers the on-the-skids adventurer an opportunity to redeem himself: go to dreary Wigan, ``the outskirts of Hell,'' and look into the disappearance of one John May
pole, Anglican curate and fiance of Hannay's daughter, Charlotte.

Though Blair is no detective, and though he vastly prefers mines that glitter with gold to those filthy tunnels that yield carbonized fuel and lethal clouds of methane gas, he has little choice if he is to have any hope of returning to Africa, where his daughter, the product of a brief union with a native woman, is being cared for by Ashanti tribesmen. In short order, he is on board a railway car ``as hushed and polished as a hearse, with oil lamps that were as low as candles,'' and in the company of returning Wigan conventioneers wearing sashes that read ``Tea -- The Drink That Cheers and Not Inebriates.''

It is a scene typical of Smith's wit and way with the language, and illustrative of what sets his books so far above the norm in the writing of adventure fiction. Though he obviously understands how to manage a clear and compelling story line, something he practiced as a writer of pulp fiction early on in his career, Smith distinguishes himself not only as a stylist but also more importantly by creating characters of originality and depth, as in the case of Arkady Renko, protagonist of his well-known series of Russia-based novels: Gorky Park, Polar Star and Red Square.

Three-dimensional character

It is the same in Rose. Though a summary might make Blair seem a version of Indiana Jones, it is less than two pages into the train journey before this explorer becomes three-dimensional: ``[Blair] rested his forehead against the cold window. Outside passed the bucolic scene of a farmer plowing behind a shire horse, man and beast plunging into a sea of mud. The English monsoon. Mud rose in brown waves, carrying the farmer away. When he closed his eyes, a conductor shook him and asked if he was ill. My eyes are as yellow as your brass buttons; does that look well to you? Blair thought.''

And then there is Rose, the mysterious, unusually articulate ``pit girl,'' or coal sorter,' with whom Blair falls in love: ``Lovely was an inanimate word. Carnality was alive, and Rose had carnality from the thick, darkened curls of her hair to the fine coppery down where her neck sloped to her shoulder. It was the way the cheap dress shifted on her hips as she led him upstairs. . . . It was stupid animal poetry. Better than poetry because appreciation entered every sense.''

Early on, Smith allows his protagonist -- an orphan, no less -- a jibe at ``Dickens's maudlin myths of London,'' then goes on to construct a plot as full of amazing developments as anything that Victorian scribe produced. Readers of Rose will surely enjoy the twists and turns of Blair's investigation and, in particular, the meticulous evocation of life as it must have been lived in a 19th Century coal-producing region: ``Blair crawled out into a narrow tunnel, the length of which was populated by shadowy figures wearing only pants and clogs, some only clogs, covered by a film of dust and glitter, swinging short, double-pointed picks. The men had the pinched waists of whippets and the banded, muscular shoulders of horses, but shining in the upcast light of their lamps what they most resembled was machinery, automatons tirelessly hacking at the pillars of coal that supported the black roof above them.''

Blair's consciousness

But the real pleasure here is in entering into the consciousness of Blair, from the delicious throwaway, ``Which is why politicians were assassinated, Blair thought, because nothing else would faze them,'' to the freighted line of dialogue, ``I travel everywhere. A poor man's odyssey. I used to do this [stargaze] when I was a boy and made up stories. See Virgo chasing Leo, instead of the other way around. What did the ancient Greeks make of that? Then a swim across the Milky Way over to Orion and his faithful Canis Major,'' to the stunning memory of his mother's sorry funeral at sea: ``As the ship plodded forward, the body sank into a wave, reappeared and swung into the side of the ship, sank into a wave, reappeared again. Because she was weighted with lead he heard her hit the ship.''

Blair being the dogged, never-leave-a-job-undone sort that he is, there's never real doubt that this mystery will eventually be solved in satisfying manner, and the canny reader may even anticipate a development here and there. But it's evident early on that how and to whom things unfold is as important as what unfolds. This is Smith's particular achievement. He has delivered a cracking good story, artfully told, about characters for whom we come to care greatly. Who could ask for more?

Les Standiford is director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University. His most recent novel is Deal to Die For.