The current craze for comics is about childhood. It’s not about good versus evil, or American kitsch. To write about comics – instead of baseball, instead of school days – is to show a soft side. It’s a way for authors to stick up for their nerdy characters and gain access to a child’s ardor for pure fantasy.

Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for his comics-themed bildungsroman “The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay,” claims a broad interest in genre writing. In his introduction to “McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales,” Mr. Chabon complained that short stories “sparkling with epiphanic due” had become the norm and marginalized “ripping yarns” of adventure.

But Mr. Chabon’s new book, his most explicitly “genred” so far, is to be admired for the feeling in its sentences, rather than its plot. Indeed, Mr. Chabon’s short book is one of the best-written American novels published this fall (though its title is seriously questionable). But as a detective story, “The Final Solution: A Story of Detection” (4th Estate, 131 pages, $16.95) disappoints.

In 1943, Sherlock Holmes would have been 89, and though he goes unnamed in this novella, the retired Holmes is Mr. Chabon’s protagonist. Holmes comes out of retirement to solve the case of a missing parrot who belonged to a young Jewish refugee. The story does achieve a loping suspensefulness welcome in a contemporary novel, but Mr. Chabon’s story is not vintage Arthur Conan Doyle. The solution to the case does not emerge from the woof and weft of incidental detail, as in the best detective stories; it seems to come too suddenly, by accident.

Nevertheless, the very tenor of adventure rewards Mr. Chabon’s ambitions. There is something very sustaining in the fusty syntax of genre fiction. As an old lady observes the crypto-Sherlock: “Oh, she thought, what a fine old man this is! Over his bearing, his speech, the tweed suit and tatterdemalion Inverness there hung, like the odor of Turkish shag, all the vanished vigor and rectitude of the Empire.”

Mr. Chabon’s enthusiasm for chestnuts of sentiment is unmistakable. An old colonel drains two inches of scotch and “gave a wistful sigh of contentment: the passing years were, in every other respect, so cruel.” Natty language like this is as risky and as considered as the larger gesture toward genre fiction. Mr. Chabon’s reclamations may be show-offy but they are hard not to like.

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Detective stories, inevitably, are about proving innocence. Jonathan Lethem’s comics-inflected vision moves in the opposite direction, from innocence to experience. Readers of last year’s acclaimed “Fortress of Solitude” know that Mr. Lethem is at his best when writing about childhood friendships, and all the best stories in his new collection, “Men and Cartoons” (Doubleday, 160 pages, $19.95), refer to some childhood connection that is revisited and tested in adult life.

Mr. Lethem’s title says it all: in this collection cartoons play the role of the ghost of Achilles, hauntingly reminding grown-up men of what they’ve left behind. In “Planet Big Zero,” a cynical cartoonist, whose strip exploits the sense of humor he and his best friend developed in high school, is vexed by the prospect of now having that high school friend as a houseguest. When he tries to deal with his emotions by putting his friend into his strip, his editor calls the new character extraneous and takes him out.

Friendship and fantasy are matched concepts for Mr. Lethem, though he emphasizes the probable loneliness of the serious sci-fi fan. In the Borgesian “The Dystopianist, Thinking of His Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door,” which thanks to its title doesn’t need to be summarized, the dystopianist is maddened to realize that his own work as a hack fantasist is outclassed by his more literary rival, who happened to be his best friend in grade school. The subtlety of his friend, which was alienating in the sixth grade, became an escape from the artistic ghetto of fantasy.

Mr. Lethem is good at finessing the epistemological hiccups of children: When one young narrator abruptly walks away from a conversation, Mr. Lethem writes simply, “Suddenly I was finished.” After another character accidentally hits a bum on the head with a door, Mr. Lethem comfortably admits how such a thing is easy to forget: “My attention just slid away. I literally couldn’t keep my mind on it.”

The rueful language of memory occasionally edges into a writerly sarcasm: One character remembers “the feral shrieks of the schoolyard.” Similarly writerly, but more welcome, is Mr. Lethem’s blunt, almost awkward brilliance in offhand descriptions, as when Super Goat Man “scurried through the leaf-blobby shade.” The “leaf-blobby shade” is a phrase that must have been waiting to exist for decades.

Mr. Lethem’s ear for the hopefulness of boys, young and old, seems more worldly than Mr. Chabon’s. But while “The Final Solution” is an experiment by a master, “Men and Cartoons” is a solid, representative slice of Mr. Lethem’s excellent work.