"The Twenty-Year Death," by Ariel S. Winter Writers who pay homage to their literary deities by imitating their idiosyncratic voices and distinctive styles usually end up looking like kids playing dress-up in their parents" clothes. Which makes the stunt Ariel S. Winter pulls off in "The Twenty-Year Death" - three loosely linked but self-­contained novels set in consecutive decades and written in the manner of Georges Simenon, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson - all the more extraordinary. The overarching design of this ambitious undertaking doesn't come completely into focus until the final novel, but the first strokes are drawn in "Malniveau Prison" when Winter casually introduces two secondary characters - the hot-­tempered, hard-­drinking American author Shem Rosenkrantz and his delicate, much younger French wife, Clotilde-­ma-Fleur, the daughter of a murder victim. The couple will become increasingly prominent as the meta-story develops. Set in a small town in France in 1931, the novel is written in a contemplative narrative voice that keenly evokes Simenon and features a watchful detective with the discreet air of Inspector Maigret. A torrential spring rain predictably greets Chief Inspector Pelleter of the Central Police when he arrives in town at the request of an incarcerated killer who informs him that inmates have been mysteriously disappearing from the local prison. When one of these missing prisoners is found murdered, Pelleter slips into the Maigret role of the unknown and feared stranger whose very presence delivers an implicit threat to the community, which would prefer to keep its secrets to itself. The crimes in this story are more lurid than anything Maigret ever faced, and resolving them requires more physical action than metaphysical reflection. But aside from the occasional clunker ("His schedule was shot; tomorrow was going to be a nightmare"), the tone of bleak desolation is remarkably faithful to its illustrious model - an achievement that proves more elusive in the second novel. "The Falling Star," set in Hollywood in 1941, owes its cynical perspective to the novel's alienated narrator, a hard-boiled private eye cast in the mold of Raymond Chandler's archetypal noir hero, Philip Marlowe. An honorable man in a dishonorable profession, Dennis Foster has a personal code of ethics that distinguishes him from unsavory clients like the movie mogul who hires him to keep tabs on an unstable star - that same fragile French beauty, now known as Chloë Rose, first glimpsed in "Malniveau Prison." "Silly me," Foster says when he's discouraged from taking his baby-sitting duties too seriously. Always trying to do the right thing. Winter, a first-time novelist whose genre savvy must owe something to his background as a bookseller, has a fine eye for the technical precision of Chandler's descriptive prose (trained here on the artificiality of life on a movie back lot), as well as the haphazard nature of his plotting. But Winter's characters - a rogues" gallery of hard men, sexy dames, secretly gay matinee idols, pornographers and dope dealers - are merely sleazy rather than steeped in moral rot. And while Foster talks tough, he lacks the bitter eloquence of Chandler's postwar knight, fighting his lonely battles in a world that has lost its values. Back on high ground in the final installment, "Police at the Funeral," Winter channels Jim Thompson in the harrowing first-person narrative of a desperate man driven to violence as he slips deeper into madness. Shem Rosenkrantz, the belligerent American author who first appeared in "Malniveau Prison" and dropped a few career notches as a hack screenwriter in "The Falling Star," sinks even lower here. With his movie-star wife confined to a private clinic after a nervous breakdown, this deadbeat louse is living off the earnings of the prostitute he's been pimping out to the mobster who holds his gambling debts. This unhealthy situation becomes even more dire when Shem learns that his long estranged but only recently deceased first wife has left her considerable fortune to their grown son, who despises his father. Hounded by his gangland creditors and crazy with fear, Shem loses what's left of his mind in an alcoholic fantasy about murdering his way out of his troubles. "Killing someone was a whole lot like writing," he reasons as he puts his insane plan into action, "a creative endeavor" that gets his juices flowing and leaves him with "the high of a good writing session." Thompson might have admired that wicked grace note. All three novels are beautifully built and sturdy enough to stand on their own. But there's something seductive, even a little sinister, about Winter's grand conceptual design of recurring faces and interlocking themes - like some glittering spider web that catches the eye of an admiring fly. Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review.