MUCH-LOVED author Monica Dickens, a descendant of Charles, had her first novel published in 1939. She died on Christmas Day last year, and now her final book One of the Family (Viking, $255) has been published posthumously. An entertaining read is provided by Listen Very Carefully, I Shall Say This Only Once, (BBC Books, $220) the autobiography of former plumber/ paint salesman/ actor and script-writer Jeremy Lloyd. He is the man who together with David Croft wrote the British comedy series Allo, Allo. He also had an acting career ''specialising in being a twit'' in half the British comedy films of the 60s and married actress Joanna Lumley. The publication of a second collection of Shusako Endo's short stories, The Final Martyrs (Peter Owen, $240), is very welcome. These stories, written between 1959 and 1985, cover familiar Endo themes such as the martyrdom of Catholics in Japan, the incongruity of Japanese in Europe and sexual yearning. In 1988, Toni Morrison's book Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her latest novel Jazz (Picador, $72), a dazzling book set in Harlem in the 20s, is now out in softback. Michael Bond's humorous Monsieur Pamplemousse on Location (Headline, $60) finds his famous gastronome turned super-sleuth on another adventure. This time he is tracking down exploding strawberries on a film set. Other books recently published in paperback: The Unknown Maxwell (Pan, $85) in which the former foreign editor of Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper, Nicholas Davies, promises to reveal all about the newspaper tycoon; Tad Szulc's The Secret Alliance (Pan, $85) about an international Jewish rescue operation; and Stephen King's latest horror, Gerald's Game (New English Library, $77).
