GOOD news for fans of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout's slothful sleuthwhom Kingsley Amis described as ''the most formidable figure in modern detective fiction''. Little, Brown continues its reprint of the late Stout's Wolfe books - first published from 1934 onwards - with Murder in Style ($255) and If Death Ever Slept ($255). If ''take two safety pins when you travel so you can pin the curtains shut in your hotel room'' strikes you as good advice, then Life's Little Instruction Book II (Thorsons $51), may be just what you need. In it H. Jackson Brown Jr provides another 500-plus truisms on ''how to live a happy and rewarding life''. Less cliched self-help guides include 60 Second Stress Management (Bantam $102) by Dr Andrew Goliszek. It claims to provide a high-speed guide to dealing with the pressures of 20th-century living. Spencer Johnson's Yes or No (Fontana $84) is blurbed as a guide to making better decisions based on real needs rather than mere wants. Having achieved such decision-making skills, you may find that you've inadvertently become just too good. In which casethere's Too Perfect (Thorsons $119), which deals with problems like fear of making errors. Author Tom Peters describes his latest book Liberation Management (Pan $119) as ''necessary disorganisation for the nanosecond nineties''. . . and there's 763 pages of it. In a rather more light-hearted vein, read The 10 Commandments of Management by Malcolm Peel and Bob Norton (Century Business $153), a witty look at the fluctuating fortunes of hapless hero Andrew Buckden, a victim of the infernal Management Destruction Unit. The Chinese University of Hong Kong: A Celebration (CUP $295) has been printed to commemorate the university's 30th anniversary. It's a large pictorial history of the institution and its students. Chinese mythology is the focus of Dragons and Dynasties (Penguin $101) which looks at the valiant heroes and tales which make up the mainland's heritage. A more factual guide to Chinese culture comes in Dr Evelyn Lip's Out of China: Culture and Traditions (Addison Wesley $159) which covers festivals, architecture, opera and food. And if that puts you in the mood to acquire a little of China's heritage, then Barbara Anderson-Tsang's guidebook Hong Kong Antique, Fine Art and Oriental Carpet Galleries ($50) should point you in the right direction. Marc Olden's Krait (Coronet $85) is a thriller about drug pusher/sexual deviant/murderer Albert Martins who's indulging in a game of snakes and ladders. In The Thief of Always (Fontana $85), Clive Barker tells of a philanthropist whose holiday home has welcomed children for years - and then extracted a deadly price. Meanwhile, the Michael Crichton bandwagon continues to roll, with publishers falling over themselves to publish the early works of the author of Jurassic Park. Latest two out are The Andromeda Strain (Arrow $60) first published in 1969 and Binary (Arrow,$60) which Crichton wrote as John Lange in 1972.
