It could have happened anywhere:

-- A woman is missing, along with a priceless artifact.

-- A casual shooting turns out to be premeditated.

-- An insurance racket needs to be unmasked.

-- An innocent man is accused of a heinous murder.

But if the crimefighters fashioned by the Mickey Spillanes, John D. MacDonalds and Dashiell Hammetts of the United States of the past were scruffier versions of the classic European amateur and professional detectives created by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and others, today's American cop represents something more: a reconciliation with "place."

The priceless object mentioned above happens to be an Anasazi pot from the concealed recesses of the Native American heartland, and two detectives of Navajo extraction conduct this investigation and others in the crime novels of Tony Hillerman.

The casual shooting takes place in a crime-infested housing project in Boston, bringing a city cop invented by writer Robert B. Parker onto the case.

The insurance scam is part of a whole tapestry of greed in the wake of natural disaster and ecological peril, recurring themes in the Florida-based comic thrillers of Carl Hiaasen.

The "wrong man" in the murder probe is an inner-city amateur sleuth named "Easy" Rawlins, in the latest in a series of thrillers by Walter Mosley.

More than ever before in their history, police procedurals have become decidedly regional in their settings, outlooks and concerns. In the past, there were just a handful of "whodunit" writers like Californians Ross Macdonald and Hammett, Floridian John D. MacDonald, a writer or two from the urban streets like Spillane, and John P. Marquand, a refined New England novelist, who devised a series of crime-solving episodes involving a respectable Asian sleuth, Mr. Moto. The focus in earlier books was on internal considerations - specifically the criminal mind. Though that remains true of many mystery novels today, recently a number of storytellers' outlooks have turned decidedly outward, and now operate on a much broader canvas.

There no longer is a stereotypical detective on the prowl. Nor is there a conventional mystery writer.

As a result, readers identify writers with their particular areas of operation much more readily than in the past. They look forward to getting some chills and, at the same time, learning about Native American culture and its preservation through Hillerman's books involving Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police. Preservation of a different type -- environmental -- in the face of storms and schemes on the Florida landscape is what drives Hiaasen to resolutely demarcate "good guys" and villains in his books. As for the speech patterns of George V. Higgins and James Lee Burke characters, could they be from anywhere but Boston and southern Louisiana?

For Hillerman, a former New Mexico newsman of German-U.S. extraction and a journalism professor, the shift to fiction rooted in place about a quarter-century ago was natural given his passion for Native American culture. It was the cross-culturalization that intrigued him. The chance to portray the landscape followed alongside. Troubled by the limited awareness of that culture among the larger population, he once observed to an interviewer that he aimed to show how ancient ways "are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways."

In the spring when the snowpack melts a hundred miles away in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins carries a steady stream. In the late-summer thunderstorm season it rises and falls between a trickle and booming flash floods, which send boulders tumbling like marbles down its bottom. In late autumn it dries. The life that occupied it finds water then only in spring-fed potholes. From where he stood on the sandstone shelf above such a pothole, Leaphorn could see the second of the ruins Etcitty had described. Two ruins, in fact.

That's equally true of Hiaasen, one of a number of south Florida reporters-turned-mystery novelists. Is it the climate, or ecological peril, or some of the clientele of the resort communities ("The criminals come to Florida for the same reason that everyone else comes to Florida -- the weather's great and they blend in with the local riffraff so well," Hiaasen says) that has galvanized him, as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Edna Buchanan and former newsman John Katzenbach and others towards crime fiction? Is it the uncertain natural forces that affect this region used to expecting the unexpected, with unpredictable damage potential? Whatever the case, schemers, polluters, developers come out the worst in his books, which are written with the passion of someone who remembers the ecology of Florida from his youth, and has witnessed its decline. "Where are we?" an unsavory character asks the unlikely hero of Hiaasen's most recent tale, Stormy Weather, while huddled by a fire in a wooded creekside setting. "Middle of nowhere," is the response. "Why?" she asks. "Because," he answers, "there's no better place to be."

A couple of states westward, in Louisiana, James Lee Burke plies his trade through the persona of Dave Robicheaux, a New Orleans homicide detective. Pointing to such earlier U.S. writers of "place" as Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell, Flannery O'Connor and Ernest Hemingway as his principal influences, Burke contends that his literary philosophy is simple: "The character and the earth on which he stands are inseparable. He is shaped by the world around him.

"A writer who writes with a causal attitude towards his protagonists is always going to indicate, in an oblique way, the raison d'être for the ethos of the character, by involving the reader in those causal relationships between environment and behavior," Burke elaborates. "But you do it with three-cushion shots [a billiards term connoting a sideways, rather than direct hit]-- that's the art."

For one thing, Burke's novels reflect the diversity of the society in the bayous of Louisiana, with its Cajun and African-American influences. The hoary ingrown political structure and remnants of the South in pre-civil rights days are strong presences. And yet, writing about Louisiana and New Orleans "just about as well as anyone ever has," according to literary critic Jonathan Yardley, Burke gets beyond politics and society to the uniqueness of the region. As another reviewer noted, he enables the reader to get that sense of place, to "smell the particular sweetness of banana trees and stagnant water, taste...fried shrimp and cayenne pepper and thyme, watch pelicans rising against crimson sunsets."

On the other side of the continent, Walter Mosley lets his audience know, forthrightly, exactly where they are:

Southeast L.A. was palm trees and poverty; neat little lawns tended by the descendants of ex-slaves and massacred Indians. It was beautiful and wild; a place that was almost a nation, populated by lost peoples that were never talked about in the newspapers or seen on the TV. You might have read about freedom marchers; you might have heard about a botched liquor store robbery (if a white man was injured) -- but you never heard about Tommy Jones growing the biggest roses in the world or how Fiona Roberts saved her neighbor by facing off three armed men with only the spirit of her God to guide her.

Mosley, all of whose Rawlins thrillers have a color in their titles (Devil in a Blue Dress, Black Betty, White Butterfly, A Red Death, A Little Yellow Dog), is a perceptive observer of society, specifically the African-American experience in Los Angeles' Watts district and elsewhere during the postwar boom in the aerospace industry in the 1950s, a time of great possibilities. It is a world as far removed from Raymond Chandler's Hollywood as Chandler's elegant detective Philip Marlowe is from Easy Rawlins, and the author's exploration of the southeastern neighborhood he remembers from his youth -- rather than the rest of Los Angeles which he visited only occasionally -- is by design. As for that ambivalence between inequity and potential, it is what fuels his work. As he told an interviewer a year ago, Los Angeles "is forever a point of discovery -- discovering the people around you and discovering who you are."

Hillerman, Hiaasen, Burke and Mosley reflect the preoccupation with surroundings so prevalent in mystery writing. And, like such contemporary writers as Richard Ford and Cormac McCarthy, a number have demonstrated their capacity to convey a sense of place even when removed from their home turf. Hillerman and George V. Higgins, the author of many Boston-based crime sagas, have been equally effective when setting episodes or full novels in Washington, D.C. Elmore Leonard, whose settings range from Detroit, Michigan, to Florida, New Orleans and Los Angeles, cites such masters of place as John Steinbeck and John O'Hara as models.

Similarly, Mosley -- in temporarily taking leave of Easy Rawlins in mid-1995 to pen a non-genre novel, RL's Dream -- painted an effective portrait, set in New York City, of an old African-American blues musician who recounts his life in flashback while dying of cancer. Conversely, Hispanic-American novelist Rudolfo Anaya penned his first mystery, Zia Summer, in 1995, to be followed in September 1996 by Rio Grande Fall, steeped in old New Mexican traditions. And Sherman Alexie, the gifted Native-American novelist, has just written his first thriller, Indian Killer, centering on a serial murderer amidst issues relating to Native Americans.

Whether today's crime novelist is peripatetic, like Leonard, or rooted in one spot like Sue Grafton, whose private eye Kinsey Millhone operates in a southern California beach community, the sense of place conveyed is keenly appreciated by the reader, who picks up on that relationship between environment and behavior that James Lee Burke summons. Even if the atmospherics are sociologically sobering rather than physically enthralling, there always exist possibilities and, as Walter Mosley notes, self-discoveries.

More than a half-century ago, Hemingway asserted, through one of his characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls, that "the world is a fine place, and worth the fighting for."

And writing about, many of America's crime novelists would agree.