A Character Assassin Who Kisses and Tells : PRUSSIAN BLUE, <i> By Tom Hyman (Viking: $19.95; 381 pp.)</i>

A listing of the various elements in this new adventure-thriller by Tom Hyman would include the CIA, the Mossad, the FBI, an envelope containing secret stuff, stacks of dead bodies, a plot for world domination, plain and fancy sex, a Stinger missile, the painting of the title (described as “a Rorschach of corruption, degeneracy, evil, suffering and terror”), a movie star and a best-selling journalist. If you guessed that the journalist would be the book’s protagonist, give yourself five points. If you thought the movie star might be his love interest, subtract five.

Investigative reporter John Brady made his rep by having an affair with international actress and sex bomb Tracy Anderson, and then writing about it. They are no longer lovers, merely friends who get together for dinner and the occasional menage a trois .

Having broadened his journalistic horizons, Brady’s latest subject/victim is one of Tracy’s old pals, the director of the CIA, Andrew Carlson. Bumping into Carlson at Tracy’s little New York apartment in the Dakota, Brady asks why the CIA honcho isn’t cooperating on the biography. Carlson replies by summing up the journalist’s literary career:

“(For) your first book, ‘The Dream Makers,’ you misrepresented yourself and your intentions in order to get inside the film industry. Several of the people who helped you later lost their jobs. . . . A producer--the one you accused of dishonesty--committed suicide the day the book came out. . . . Your next work, on the Shah of Iran, was one hell of a hatchet job on everyone involved--him, his family, his friends, his government ministers, and every American leader who ever had anything to do with him.

“Then your third book about the Long Island socialite convicted of killing his wife. . . . You ingratiated yourself with this individual, swore to him you believed he was innocent. You got him and his lawyers to give you access to everything they did and said during the trial . . . . And after a jury found him guilty, you kept up the pretense. You even wrote him in prison, commiserated with him, told him how unfair the verdict was--all the while pumping him for more information to flesh out your book. . . . You never let him know that you were going to portray him as a monster. And he didn’t find out until the book was published.

“You’re not a journalist, you’re a character assassin. Every book you’ve written, you’ve betrayed the trust of your subjects and destroyed their reputation and honor in print.”

“Okay,” Brady tells Carlson. “You don’t think I’m the man to do your life story.”

It’s the funniest line in the novel, funny because, though Brady is convinced he’s on the side of the angels, he seems to know full well that he’s a sleazeball. Now here’s the big question: Are the thriller-readers of the ‘90s ready for a sleazeball hero?

If we’ve arrived at that point in time when one may happily accept a protagonist with practically no ethics or morals, then “Prussian Blue” might be described as an entertaining, wild and woolly yarn, filled with wisecracks, car chases, plane chases, gunfights and gore, all interspersed with bedroom gymnastics. Hyman’s style is refreshingly unpretentious. There is an assortment of twists and turns, some predictable, some not. A loose end--the identity of an assassin named Helga--is never specifically tied (unless my eyes were averted at the time). But the author has left more than enough clues for us to figure out her identity.

If, however, one prefers a slightly less tarnished hero, one might be better off going retro and perusing the no-more-improbable Ian Fleming novels of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. James Bond may have been no saint. But at least he never kissed and told.