What Makes Sammy Runyon?

THE GANG THAT COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT by Jimmy Breslin. 249 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Last summer Jimmy Breslin, a licensed sentimental tough-guy journalist, startled New York by running in the Democratic primary for the office of president of the city council on Norman Mailer's ticket. Now, running for the office of tough comic novelist, Breslin proves slightly more deft with bullets than he did with ballots.

The trouble begins when Anthony "Baccala" Pastrumo Sr., one of five big New York Mafia bosses, decides to revive the old six-day bicycle race as a gimmick for gamblers. Baccala, who would rather tie a man to a jukebox and heave him into the ocean, cuts a moronic upstart young hood named Kid Sally Palumbo in on the action in order to pacify Palumbo and his murderous followers. Kid Sally, who "couldn't run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers' cars," bungles the operation and then sets out to knock off Baccala and his gang. Caught in the crossfire is a ludicrous love interest between Palumbo's sister and an artistic con man imported from Italy to take part in the aborted bike race.

Lion with B.O. Breslin parades a gaggle of neo-Runyonesque caricatures, proving mainly that Damon's were pithiest. There is, for instance, 425-pound Big Jelly Catalano, who likes two girls at once and "always takes his clothes off when he eats"--not to mention Roz the Meter Maid, Tony the Indian, Joe the Wop, Beppo the Dwarf and a lion with body odor. Yet the book is funny, particularly on the sadistic Tom-and-Jerry cartoon level of violence, because the characters aren't real and nothing is really at stake but a few laughs.

Breslin's side-of-the-mouth humor proceeds from flat understatement followed immediately by clarifying overstatement: "Raymond the Wolf passed away in his sleep one night from natural causes; his heart stopped beating when the three men who slipped into his bedroom stuck knives in it." Occasionally he offers a bemused sociological insight: "Southern Italy is the same as the rest of the world. People stroke and polish machines while goats urinate in their houses." The trouble is that after a while the joke, like chewing gum on a bedpost, loses its flavor.

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