CROWN COURT

A ""novelization"" from a British TV courtroom series--and, as a classy chunk of 60- or 90-minute television, it might be grand. Here it's just adequate, as three cases come before coarsely witty Mr. Justice Sinclair Vice: a porno seller (he's acquitted), an adulterous couple who murdered the intrusive deep-sea-diver husband by fiddling with his aqualung (acquitted also), and a group of Marxist terrorist bombers who take the whole courtroom hostage. The off-and-on focus is on one juror, an out-of-work charmer whose wife is in difficult labor at the hospital across the street. Lively but interminable verbal exchanges, zero tension, a long lesson in aqualungs, as much sex as can somehow be injected, and no substitute for a real book.