Let me think for a moment. Would I rather read a mystery written by a cat or have my left foot amputated with a rusty kitchen knife? Would I prefer to read a book in which a cat or some other family pet actually solves the crime or listen to a recording of the complete speeches of Hillary Rodham Clinton? Would I prefer to have someone use pliers to remove all my teeth without pain killer or read a novelization of a television show?

I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

Just when I thought there could be no lower form of literature, that the very concept of creative writing had been debased as conclusively as the human mind could imagine, a brand new threat to what remained of taste and intelligence in crime fiction loomed like a nasty black mushroom cloud.

Not a book in which a teleplay was rewritten by some hack to make it look like a novel. Not a book about characters created for television. No. How about a book written by a character from a television soap opera. No, not an actor in the daytime serial – the character!

Just as I was reaching for the antacid, however, I was startled to see that “The Killing Club” (Hyperion, $19.95, 276 pages) was co-authored by one of the most distinguished authors in America. Although the byline is shared by Marcie Walsh, a character on “One Life To Live,” ABC’s long-running daytime drama, the true author is the brilliant and talented Michael Malone.

Mr. Malone was once one of the most critically acclaimed writers of the American novel. Such classics as “Dingley Falls” were favorably compared to John Irving’s “The World According to Garp,” and “Handling Sin” was one of the notable books of the 1980s.

When he turned to mystery fiction, with “Uncivil Seasons,” he created one of the great teams of working policemen in all literature: Justin Savile, the black sheep of a genteel Southern family that despises his career choice, and Cuddy Mangum, a blue-collar guy who is nonetheless as intelligent and honorable as the man he works with. (As an aside, permit me to recommend “Uncivil Seasons” to you with tremendous enthusiasm. It is as good as literary crime fiction gets – and literary does not mean slow moving or boring, but stylish, intelligent, original, compelling, and memorable.)

Where was I? Oh, yes. Mr. Malone wrote two more excellent mysteries involving the same characters, “Time’s Witness” and “First Lady.” All three are still in print from SourceBooks.

Now the bad news. Television discovered what a great storyteller he is and convinced him to write “One Life To Live,” which he did for many years. Since writing five shows a week, 52 weeks a year, takes a lot of time and exhausts creative energy, he largely stopped writing books.

This column is here to brighten your day with good news, though. He quit the show and is back doing what he’s supposed to do, which is write novels. And that first effort is “The Killing Club,” which turns out to be a swell book.

Okay, it’s not a Justin and Cuddy book. The depth of characterization in those beauties is absent, and there is no denying its soap-opera antecedents. Set in a small New Jersey town, the number of people cheating on their spouses makes “Peyton Place” seem stodgy.

The story is about a group of high school students who are outsiders and form their own little club, in which they plan the fictional murders of anyone who makes their lives miserable – which is just about everyone. They invent bizarre scenarios for doing away with teachers, parents, classmates, etc., and record them in notebooks.

A decade later, members of the club start dying, and always in a way in which they had imagined committing one of their own murders. Jamie Ferrara, a spunky young detective, herself a member of “The Killing Club,” investigates the crimes, deducing that a terrible event from the past has its deadly repercussions in the present.

The genesis of Mr. Malone’s involvement in this type of literary endeavor is interesting and not exactly a straight line. Hyperion asked him to write a novel that tied into the daytime show and he refused. His affection for television novelizations is, I suspect, approximately on a par with my own.

As he thought about it, however, he came up with the idea of having a character on the show create a mystery novel on the show. Over the course of an entire year, Marcie Walsh (played by Kathy Briar) planned the book, spoke about it, wrote it, and read from it. Then the character sent the book to a novelist and professor at a nearby university.

Yes, that would be one Michael Malone. He helped her get it published at … yes, Hyperion. The book on the show and the book in real life were published simultaneously this month.

With a lesser writer, this might have been considered a stab at a commercial success, without regard to whether some trees had died for a good cause. With Michael Malone at the typewriter, it has turned out to be a killer of a book.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.