STOLEN AWAY, a Novel of the Lindbergh Kidnapping, by Max Allan Collins, Bantam, 526 pages, $22.50 hardcover, $9.99 paperback.

No one laughed after 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. was plucked from his nursery in Hopewell, N.J., after a decaying corpse later was identified as the child’s by his father, and certainly not after convicted murderer Bruno Hauptmann died in the electric chair four years afterward.

But this well-crafted work of fiction is loaded with crackling dialogue and a wry retelling of “the crime of the century” that will leave you chuckling.

A light approach to a heavy subject works because Max Allan Collins, the award-winning author of the “Dick Tracy” comic strip and more than 20 novels, knows his boundaries. Never is he disrespectful toward Charles and Anne Lindbergh, whose lives were shattered by the 1932 kidnapping.

Chicago detective Nate Heller is summoned to Lindbergh’s secluded estate because the aviator erroneously believes him to be a kidnapping expert. Lindy gives Nate free reign to the property and all evidence, including a cryptic note left in the nursery the night of the crime.

Sparks soon fly between the wise-guy Heller and the bellicose Col. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of Stormin’ Norman, then the superintendent of the New Jersey State Police. Schwarzkopf is said to be heading the investigation, but Heller is no dummy: The revered Lindbergh, who knows nothing about criminal matters, is really calling the shots.

Relying on his own intuition, Heller sniffs out a myriad of leads and meets such characters as Edgar Cayce, the renowned psychic, and the insufferable Dr. John F. Condon, nicknamed “Jafsie,” who is contacted by the kidnappers and hands over the ransom money in an inner-city graveyard.

In an unjustified use by Collins of an actual historical figure in a work of fiction, Heller interviews, and later rolls in the hay with, Evelyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope Diamond, who is bilked out of a fortune by a con man named Gaston Means when she attempts to solve the kidnapping herself, and later to prove Hauptmann’s innocence.

The detective’s deathhouse interview with Hauptmann is choice, with this example of fine writing by Collins:

“… Three rows of straight-back folding chairs … faced the sheet-covered hot seat, like a meeting in a little union hall. Only if I were the guest speaker, I wouldn’t sit down after my talk.”

Heller eventually puts the Lindbergh investigation behind him, returns to Chicago and his A-1 Detective Agency, but is called back to New Jersey by Gov. Harold Hoffman, who believes Hauptmann is innocent. Ultimately, Heller implicates Al Capone and a servant (yes, the butler did it) inside the Lindbergh household, and turns “Little Lindy” up alive — all in a race against time with Hauptmann rotting on death row.

Thanks to exhaustive research and a brilliant mind for deduction, Collins may finally have solved one of the most famous crimes in American history. A tangled web of kidnapping and extortion, he shows, probably was spun by many people, certainly not by a German carpenter who was convicted by the courts and the American press.

Richard R. Shaw is the NEWS editorial page assistant.