Harlem Idiom

GO DOWN DEAD by Shane Stevens. 236 pages. Morrow. $4.95.

At 16, Adam Clayton Henry is loaded with esoteric knowledge learned from life, not books. He knows the rituals and rules of gang fighting, which are as elaborate as the code duello. He plays it cool under the scrutiny of the head-breakers (police) and can find his way to black-and-white parties in Greenwich Village pads. He knows every malodorous inch of the eight-block Harlem area that is the Playboys' turf, and he has earned the nickname "King" by taking over the leadership of the gang from Raven, who had fatally misjudged a leap from one tenement rooftop to another.

This first novel, which relates eight days in King's life, contains enough action--both lethal and sexual--to flesh out a sociological study of Harlem, and enough profanity to outfit a platoon of Marines. Shane Stevens has invented an idiom for his swaggering teen-agers that gives pungency to King's occasional meditations. On school, for example: "Everyone shouting and screaming and nobody care about what they is going on. But at least it somewhere to stay away from when they make you go." And on the purpose of fighting gangs: "In this bizness you got have a place of you own and a chain of command and all that. Everything go by the book. Then you get a name. And when you get the name maybe you can stay live a while. Thas why most men get in ganes. To stay live. Thas why the gangs form in the first place."

King emerges as a well-realized character, but the rest of his gang runs to stereotype: Dancer is the resident intellectual because he "listen to TV news and he even read a paper clear through sometime"; Moose looks like a moose and thinks like one; and Morris, whose specialty is filming stag movies, runs periodic training drives to get fresh talent, male and female, white and black.

It requires considerable daring and talent for a writer to render the nuances and idiom of Harlem life. Shane Stevens, 28, deserves praise for his achievement, especially because he is a white man. His Harlem mood, at times funny but mostly depressing and barbed with the hopeless hostilities of the ghetto people, will shock and sober white readers. As to the authenticity of character and action, hardly anyone outside Harlem can really judge.

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