HERE'S something I pulled up from the memory bank the other day, after cruising the mystery aisles of my neighborhood bookstore and discovering that many of the new titles had a distinctly chick-lit ring. The memory that still burns bright is of an editor at a major publishing house addressing a packed auditorium of would-be authors, advising them to retool their unsold novels as mysteries. ''That's what I've been telling my romance authors to do,'' she said, ''because the mystery has a built-in structure. This solves your plot problems by giving you a simple formula to follow, but it still allows you to develop your heroine and get your romance into the story.'' I nearly crawled under my seat, dreading the invasion of crime fiction by all those undisciplined romantics.
Well, that was a long time ago. And while romance authors didn't destroy the classic detective story, they did vamp on its stylistic conventions. Call the resulting subgenre the chick-lit mystery or the babe book or whatever you will, but you can't miss its gaudy manifestations -- those slender volumes with cute titles like ''Dating Dead Men'' and ''Killer Heels'' and covers in such juicy colors you don't know whether to read the flap copy or lick the jacket.
Slim stories. Joke titles. Juicy jacket art. Does a pattern begin to emerge? For a category of mystery still relatively new to the market, the babe book has already settled into some fairly narrow grooves. Even if you ignore the generally deplorable level of the writing (which is surely an unintentional aspect of the formula), these novels scrupulously observe all the basic chick-lit conventions: the giddy girls in their glamorous jobs, the shopping sprees and fashion makeovers, the gossipy friends, the disastrous dates and the wry comic voice of a heroine so adorable she could be . . . you.
Adding a mystery component does more than give a bubble-headed form a sturdier narrative structure. By challenging the flighty heroine to solve a crime, it offers her the chance both to prove her character and fire up her sex life. At the same time, by substituting wholesome boy-girl sex -- or, as the authors would have it, romance -- for the subliminal eroticism of violence that drives the traditional crime novel, the chick-lit mystery burns its own identifying brand on the form.
Janet Evanovich, who practically invented the sassy-girl crime novel with ''One for the Money'' in 1994 and for years held the field alone, dangles erotic delights with the skill of a fan dancer in her caper comedies about a New Jersey bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum. Over 10 books (in which nobody ages), Evanovich has kept Stephanie in a perpetual state of sexual arousal, poised between the attentions of Joe Morelli, the hot and hunky cop who has been pursuing her since high school, and Ranger, a coolly lethal mercenary. In her latest book, ''Eleven on Top,'' Stephanie describes her romantic frustration: ''It was like choosing between birthday cake and a big-boy margarita.''
Even when a chick-lit mystery doesn't actually portray the deed, it provides plenty of virtual sex -- more than enough to stimulate the incessant girl talk that replaces action in this relatively violence-free genre. A box of bedroom toys does the trick in ''Batteries Required,'' the fourth case for Jennifer Apodaca's amateur sleuth, Samantha Shaw, who runs a dating service and calls herself ''a romance expert'' but squeals at the very notion of a salesman offering samples of ''fur-lined handcuffs and vibrators.''
Judging from its racy title and the fact that its heroine is a high-end call girl, you'd think that ''Sex, a Mystery,'' by Fiona Quirina, would be less coy. But Lydia Quess, who refers to herself as a ''courtesan,'' is even more fastidious, mindful of her image as a career woman with an M.B.A. from Harvard and a magna cum laude degree in French literature and philosophy from Barnard. Typical of the teasing contrivances of the plot, one scene opens promisingly in the Manhattan duplex Lydia shares with a saintly priest, but is cut short when she leaves her bedroom to replenish the Champagne bucket -- and returns to find her client murdered with an ice pick.