TUNNEL VISION

By John Skow

A little industrial-strength over-writing never hurt a thriller about mean streets in the big city, and first novelist Thomas Kelly knows when to break out the purple ink in Payback (Knopf; 273 pages; $23). "Billy peered over the edge of the roof," Kelly writes. "Far below, the life of the city surged through the streets like the blood of a great snarling beast, unimpeded by his concerns. He was just one more fool in its hard history who'd gotten in over his head." Good magenta stuff, requiring only a little Hammond-organ ominoso to sound like the musings of Guy Noir, Garrison Keillor's private eye, who works "on the 12th floor of the Acme Building, in a city that knows how to keep its secrets."

Billy Adare, Payback's in-over-his-head hero, is an honest law student who pays his tuition by working summers at the family trade of sandhogging, in a big water tunnel being dug beneath Manhattan. The work is dangerous enough at the best of times, but jostling has broken out between Irish construction thugs from Hell's Kitchen, who by tradition control labor in the tunnel, and Italian heavies hired by management to break the union. At first Billy tries to ride out the skirmishing. Then his elder brother Paddy, a former prizefighter who is an enforcer for the Irish mob, hands him a pistol and tells him to make himself scarce. "These guys are psychos. I just don't know how it's gonna play out," says Paddy.

Violently, of course, is how it plays out. But as matters rumble toward a good, tough-guy ending, what sounds real is not so much the corrupt politics of the construction business as the shot-and-a-beer talk of the guys who wear hard hats. Kelly knows how the palaver goes in the kind of bar that doesn't have ferns, the boozy, unchanging gab about sports, women and the System that defines the deep, edgy pessimism of blue- collar men. "Einstein" is what they call Billy, out of class respect and class resentment. But as shots are heard at the end, it is unclear whether he will make it back to law school.

--By John Skow