Those good old days. Why do they sound more interesting than the time we live in?

	"The Intelligencer" By Leslie Silbert Atria Books, Simon & Schuster ($24)

Maybe it's because they weren't quite as complex and ambiguous as the messages we're getting in the post-Cold War era.

For suspense novelists, the past is also easier to manipulate than this world where circumstances -- and allies -- change daily.

Leslie Silbert is a new entry in the crowded suspense genre, but her publisher bills her as an expert, telling us: "She works as a private investigator under the guidance of a former CIA officer."

Silbert's a double threat as well, having "studied Renaissance literature at Oxford."

Thanks to those Machivellian Medicis, spying became one of the Renaissance arts, practiced with gusto by the English during the games of religious musical chairs they played in the 16th century.

Silbert then should bring both academic and street knowledge to her new pursuit as a writer, but, alas, her maiden voyage is launched on choppy seas. She alternates scenes from the final days of playwright Christopher Marlowe with a contemporary tale featuring private eye-CIA operative (no surprise) Kate Morgan.

Marlowe is believed to have been a double-dipper, moonlighting as an "intelligencer" or spy for agents of Queen Elizabeth between writing his popular potboilers for the London crowd. He was killed in 1593, a victim, in the official version, of a tavern squabble.

Silbert shows off her scholarship quite nicely when she's following Kit Marlowe around London's fetid streets, but her modern-day story is slow-moving and predictable.

The connection is the discovery of a manuscript of spy files from Marlowe's day that should provide plenty of material for a novel, but Silbert adds another plot thick with Middle Eastern overtones.

Mistake. When she works with history and real characters, her writing is full of the atmosphere and paranoia of the Elizabethan era. When she switches to her contemporary tale of shadowy financiers, art dealers, a captured American spy and a sexually conflicted Iranian, we can't wait for the next Marlowe chapter.

He's a more interesting and accomplished spy than Kate Morgan, who is saddled with four strong male figures, including her father, "the Senator," in her life, confusing both her and us.

The book concludes with a clumsy parallelism structure, causing me, as I gazed on Silbert's glam photo on the cover, to paraphrase Marlowe:

"Is this the face that will launch a thousand sequels?"