Threat

Mr. Jessup wrote more than 60 books, most of them paperback originals about crime (''A Rage to Die''), detectives (''Cry Passion''), Indians (''Comanche Vengeance'') and adventure (''The Deadly Duo,'' about an American reporter who tries to foil a murder on the Riviera). He wrote under several pseudonyms, including Richard Telfair, and he also wrote radio shows and television scripts.

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His best known work, ''The Cincinnati Kid,'' published in 1964 in hardcover and later made into a motion picture with Steve McQueen, Edward G. Robinson, Ann Margaret and Tuesday Weld, was highly praised in The Times. ''Mr. Jessup has brilliantly enlarged the microcosm of the gambling table, to make it a genuine setting for a novel,'' said the reviewer. ''Within its circle, men act out again and again their commitment against the gratuitousness and terror of fate. Some turn into machines that bleed inside. And others come to know finally that they are human beings.''

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Mr. Jessup attributed much of his outlook to a chance meeting with Albert Camus in Marseilles in 1945, during which they drank together for hours and the philosopher impressed upon the 20-year-old seaman his existential philosophy.

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Mr. Jessup wrote the book and the screenplay for ''Chuka,'' about the lone survivor of a massacre by Arapaho Indians in the 1870's. The movie starred Rod Taylor, Ernest Borgnine and John Mills. Mr. Jessup also wrote ''Foxway,'' a novel published in 1971 about a psychologically distraught young combat veteran of Vietnam. His last novel, ''Threat,'' published last year, also dealt with a Vietnam veteran, this one who was working his way through Columbia University by robbing bookies in an effort to raise ransom money for his twin brother, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese.