October 16, 1983

Despite President Ferdinand Marcos's most vigorous efforts to dispel it, the ghost of Benigno S. Aquino Jr. continues to haunt the Philippines. Last week, the high-level commission the President had appointed to investigate the murder of Mr. Aquino, the opposition leader, abruptly quit, in response to widespread doubts about its impartiality. The commission had been stymied by lawsuits and skepticism that Marcos appointees would find the culprit. The first chairman, Chief Justice Enrique Fernando, took the criticism seriously and quit. The President's next choice as chairman, Arturo Tolentino, a Foreign Ministry official, rejected the job as ''cosmetic.'' Five other commission members - four retired Supreme Court justices and a member of Parliament - also quit.

WASHINGTON PRESIDENT REAGAN'S abrupt decision to nominate William P. Clark, the national security adviser, to be Secretary of the Interior had immediate implications for foreign and domestic policy, campaign politics and the Reagan Presidency. It also offered a window on the relationship of two close friends and on a paradox of the President's style. Reliant as he is on his aides for guidance, Mr. Reagan's independence of mind can still startle. Mr. Clark was not on any original staff list of candidates to succeed Interior Secretary James G. Watt, who resigned a week ago after Senate passage of a measure calling for his ouster became a certainty. Neither James A. Baker 3d nor Michael K. Deaver, the White House chief and deputy chief of staff, was reported to be happy with the Clark choice. Though both had had sharp differences with Mr. Clark in the White House, both also wanted to fill the Interior post with a political figure who could reassure Mr. Reagan's western political base and defuse the hostilities of environmental groups. Mr. Baker and Mr. Deaver saw a happy coincidence in the fact that such an opportunity came just as the President gave formal approval to the formation of a re-election committee. Having passed the week wooing a series of prominent western Republicans, they are now bracing for a confirmation fight that is sure to revive the antagonisms they had hoped would fade with Mr. Watt's departure.

DASHIELL HAMMETT A Life. By Diane Johnson. Illustrated. 344 pp. New York: Random House. $17.95. If you were to go merely by the quantity (rather than the quality) of his imitators, you could argue that Dashiell Hammett was a more important writer than James Joyce. There were one or two writers of at least parboiled crime fiction before Hammett, but Hammett gave his imitators more than an attitude. He gave them a cast of characters, a resilient plot, a setting, a repertory of images, a style, a keyhole view of society, an ethos and, above all, a hero. Sam Spade is an old American type brought up to date, Hawkeye become private eye with fedora and street smarts instead of leatherstockings and wood lore, his turf the last frontier of San Francisco. The invention of a new popular genre is to the lesser world of literature what the invention of a new form of government is to the larger world of institutions - and just as rare. There are good reasons, then, for reading or writing a biography of Hammett, and Diane Johnson's cool, steady-eyed and engrossing ''Dashiell Hammett'' is the third in as many years.

-cut insurance needs of rental tenants, who should cover their furnishings and personal belongings, or the owners of a house, who should cover the structure as well as its contents, the coverage requirements of a condominium or cooperative owner are complex. If the buyer of a condominium or cooperative is financing with a mortgage, the lender will want proof that the building's structure is covered. This coverage is taken out by the governing board of the building, and further coverage is discretionary. ''What the person wants to do about his own unit is up to him,'' said Arthur Carter, assistant mortgage officer at the Dime Savings Bank of New York.

When 32-year-old Mitchell L. Kapor took his fledgling computer software company, the Lotus Development Corporation, public less than two weeks ago, he made a fortune - roughly $70 million in fact. That this former radio disc jockey and teacher of transcendental meditation turned to computer programming only a few years ago simply adds to the feat. It is the stuff of which legends are made, especially in the personal computer software business. Throughout the land, other young and ambitious entrepreneurs are toiling away late into the night struggling to write that next great piece of software - a set of instructions, usually embedded in a gray disk, that allows the nation's computers to perform useful tasks. These lone programmers working in their basements are also dreaming of creating the next Lotus. But such visions may be unrealistic - for Mr. Kapor's accomplishment, dramatic as it may be, is no rags-to- riches success story. Mr. Kapor was amply backed by nearly $5 million in venture capital. To introduce its personal computer program, called simply ''1-2-3,'' Lotus spent more than $1 million in advertising in a three- month period - an unprecedented level for the industry.