Stanley Ellin's most recent book is ''The Specialty of the House and Other Stories, 1948-1978.'' FOR SPECIAL SERVICES By John Gardner. 298 pp. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $9.95. THE ENGLISH LADY By William Harrington. 408 pp. New York: Seaview Books. $13.95.

KAMAL By D.W. Arathorn. 351 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $14.50. By STANLEY ELLIN

The reviepoliceman's, is not always a happy one. Putting these three novels to the test, I was pleased to discover that two were very good. Then I was plunged from elation to depression by the realization that the third was a dud, and for reasons having nothing to do with the author's well-proven talent.

The book in question is ''For Special Services,'' by John Gardner. It is a James Bond story - Mr. Gardner's second try at rattling those moldering bones - and, as the author's foreword suggests, it was inspired not by any of the nine Muses but rather by a consortium of 007's copyright holders and publishers, along with the Saab motor car company of Sweden, which now provides Bond with his transportation.

At this point I will say that, after considering the extraliterary alliance associated with the venture, I don't believe any writer could have done better with this curious project than John Gardner, but it is simply a defeating project to start with. Ian Fleming was a dreadful writer, a creator of books for grown-up boys, a practitioner of tin-eared prose. As evidenced by his writings, he was also by nature a ferocious and humorless snob, a political primitive, a chauvinist in every possible area whose ideas about sexuality apparently were implanted by fevered readings of ''Lady Chatterly's Lover.''

John Gardner, creator of the inimitable and delightful Boysie Oakes among other characters, is the antithesis to all this, a writer of style and wit with a sharp-eyed, acidulous and yet appreciative view of humanity and its foibles. Fleming's shoes are simply too tight and misshapen for Mr. Gardner to wear comfortably. Fleming, however, did offer the reader one thing no imitator can possibly duplicate: total identification with and commitment to his hero and his works as the products of an uninhibited wish fulfillment.

When, on film, Bond was transmuted into the charismatic and sardonic Sean Connery, we were getting a different 007 altogether; it is this cinematic Bond that Mr. Gardner, his risibilities not always in control, presents to us off and on. How else to explain a 30-foot python that is not only capable of ingesting a full-grown man but also of carefully removing the victim's indigestible shoes before doing so? Or the fact that ice cream, no special flavor noted, is the device by which the villains, having dosed gallons of it with the ultimate tranquilizer, will sieze control of the American forces guarding NORAD and, consequently, the killer satellite it operates? Yes, I did say ice cream.

To put it in a nutshell, or ice-cream cone, the story is largely set in America, where Bond, partnered now by the luscious daughter of old C.I.A. opposite number Felix Leiter, is once again up against SPECTRE, dominated by what appears to be the shade of that long-dead evil genius Ernst Stavro Blofeld. There are some good things among the zany proceedings: an automobile road race described to nerveracking effect; the amusing relationship between the aging Bond and the youthful Cedar Leiter; a climax where Bond is drugged into imagining he is the woolly-headed Gen. James A. Banker, U.S.A. - all pure John Gardner at his Boysie Oakes best. This still doesn't compensate for the awkwardness of the whole project. The reader will do better to head for anything by Mr. Gardner that isn't imitation Fleming. As pure Gardner, he is quite a writer. *