Naughty Old New York

TENDERLOIN (372 pp.)--Samuel Hopkins Adams--Random House ($4.95).

A grafting police chief named "Slogger" Williams christened the area in the 1880s: "I've been living on rump steak long enough. Now I'll have some tenderloin." The Tenderloin contained all that was gaudiest, naughtiest, richest and most crooked in wide-open Gay Nineties New York. Bounded by Manhattan's 14th Street on the south, 42nd Street on the north, Fourth Avenue on the east and North River on the west, it sported theaters, brothels, lordly hotels, the Met, Delmonico's and the Tenderloin Club ("Check your Morals with the Blonde at the Door"). This novel from the late, prolific Samuel Hopkins Adams is a saucy, nostalgic valentine to a territory he covered as a stripling turn-of-the-century reporter for the New York Sun. It is a period piece with a period plot written in period prose. But it has the sentimental lift of a barbershop ballad and the charm of a day when women in hourglasses worshiped men out of mustache cups.

The Old Ranikaboo. Tenderloin's hero, Dan Adriance, is a crack newsman from Park Row. Dan's journalistic hero worshiper is Tommy Howatt, an upstart scribbler for the Police Gazette. Tommy has a heart of gold, a voice of silver and a nerve of brass. When Tommy meets Dan's lissome cousin Laurie Crosbie, he is ready to give up slang, his "Levy's Dollar Delight" shirts, and the use of Barry's "Tricopherous" hair pomade to win the hand of his first true love. What Tommy, Dan and Laurie do not know, and the plot does not soon tell, is that Laurie's mother, a seemingly respectable matron, was once the notorious Sutter Street Kate, a San Francisco bawdyhouse keeper. This secret threatens no one's happiness until a stalwart Christian soldier, the Rev. Brockholst Farr, begins his hellfire-and-brimstone crusade against vice and the political overlords who profit from it. From then on true love suffers through many a "ranikaboo," i.e., caper, but wins, of course, in the end.

The Lone Tree. What makes the plight of the lovers and all other characters in Tenderloin unintentionally funny is Adams' prose archaisms, e.g., "with malice prepense," "their lips sundered,"

"Laurie regarded him with a baleful eye. She had not forgotten this man's attempt upon her innocence." With malice post-pense Tenderloin could be dismissed as just corn, except for Adams' loving recreation of a closed chapter of Americana. When he died last November at 87, he left behind him precious few who could remember when the martini was called the Lone Tree, when the slang for smooth talk was "soft sawder," and when "a quarter tip marked the giver a millionaire or a sucker."

Tenderloin is Broadway-bound, and if all goes well, the musical history lesson should be a warm, lively, appealing ranikaboo.

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