A transgressive tale of identity and angst

In a recent interview, asked my major influences as a writer, right alongside pedigree writers like James Joyce and newly gentrified ones like Raymond Chandler I cited science fiction films of the 1950s. I was joking, but only partly. Because an important part of the way I see the world, and the way I reconstruct that world in my stories, was indeed formed by those films.

''Invasion of the Body Snatchers," ''Them!," ''Invaders From Mars," ''The Incredible Shrinking Man." Something about them -- their apartness, their subversiveness, their surety that the world was not as described and possibly not even as perceived, their sense of strange redemptions -- something drew me inexorably and draws me still.

And right up there with science fiction films were original paperback novels.

These were in many ways a world unto themselves, slick, alluring, lipstick-bright, shiny like sweat and new coins with the promise of sex and violence and an existence that, however brutal, made sense. The world within them looked like our world, but there were trapdoors everywhere, and soon one fell through, into this other place, a world somehow harder, more substantial, more truthful. Toto, we're not in Middle America anymore.

Many of us remain entranced by those novels. I even wrote a small book, ''Difficult Lives," about them, centering on Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Chester Himes. And when I dedicated my latest novel ''to Ed McBain, Donald Westlake and Larry Block -- three great American writers," I meant it. Those guys were there when it happened. They knew.

All are represented, along with a host of others, in the newish line of deliciously lurid paperbacks from Hard Case Crime, a publisher ''dedicated to reviving the vigor and excitement, the suspense and thrills . . . of the golden age of paperback crime novels." Mixing reprints and originals, and producing cover art marvelously reminiscent of Gold Medal and Lion and their contemporaries, Hard Case is, basically, a kick in the head. You feel you should smuggle these things into the house and read them after everyone else has gone to bed.

There are vintage Blocks, ''The Girl With the Long Green Heart" and ''Grifter's Game"; an original by Stephen King, ''The Colorado Kid"; ''361" by Westlake; a great Ed McBain, ''The Gutter and the Grave"; and others by Max Allan Collins, Max Phillips, Allan Guthrie, and Day Keene.

And there's ''Night Walker" ($6.99), by Donald Hamilton.

Hamilton, like McBain, is one of those writers I read obsessively back when I was beginning to write: his Matt Helm novels, ''Assassins Have Starry Eyes," a Western or two -- one by one as they came, cover to cover, word by word. I'm sure I learned as much from him and from McBain as I did from anyone. Though ''learned" may not be the correct word: ''absorbed" is probably more accurate.

''He awoke with a nurse holding him to keep him from throwing himself out of the hospital bed. When he lay still, warm waves of pain washed over him, gradually subsiding. Through the gaps in the bandages that otherwise completely swathed his face and head he could see the white hospital ceiling dim with night again. It had been night when they had brought him into this room. There had been a day, and now it was night again."

There is also a nurse calling him by a name that's not his, the name of a man who committed treason and drove his wife to murder.

One hallmark of great genre work is that, while more horizontal than vertical, focusing always on story, it penetrates quite naturally and unself-consciously to questions of identity and ontology. For the most part these are headlong narratives. But just as the ''Body Snatchers" pod people touch and profoundly disturb something deep within us, so does the bandaged man's awakening without a past in that hospital room. Unembellished and close to the bone, these stories often reach down to the same pools inside us all from which universal myths issue.

A prime progenitor of this school of writing is James M. Cain, whose work one critic described as ''force of circumstance driving characters to the commission of dreadful acts." This seems to me as fine a definition of the noir or crime novel as we're ever likely to have. And there's not as much difference as you may think between Odysseus fighting his way home from the wars and the guy tossed off that hay truck on the first page of ''The Postman Always Rings Twice."

Admittedly, novels like ''Night Walker," novels like all those published by Hard Case Crime, are not for everyone. They're muscular, hard-edged, transgressive, often suffused with the racism, chauvinism, and fascistic leanings of their birth era. Best taken in measured doses, they're perhaps best seen as palliatives, correctives for the tameness and dailiness of our lives, momentary returns to the wilderness, pocket-size lightings-out for the territory.

Warn the children and the infirm. Here in this strong meat there is gristle. There is bone.

James Sallis's new novel, ''Cripple Creek," will be out from Walker/Bloomsbury in April, the paperback of last year's ''Drive" from Harcourt in the fall.