Great unknowns

The problem with new books is that they keep us from reading old ones. Every serious reader has a list of neglected writers. And perhaps it's proper that writers be in a sense kept down: that they stay hungry, remain outsiders. There's quite a gulf, however, between that and going unread. So here, culled from my very long list, are three neglected though I hope not forgotten favorites. Lean in close and listen. They have important things to tell you.

If, as Lionel Trilling insisted, literature has at its heart an adversary intention, ``detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes," then Robert Sheckley was the kid in the back row laughing through the commencement address.

Sheckley died last December , leaving behind 40 or so novels and dozens of short stories, all of them quirky, many of them like nothing seen before. Fascinated by mankind's endless pretensions and frail attempts to communicate, as well as by the slipperiness of the universe, Sheckley was a true original, the first and perhaps the wildest of many wild men in science fiction, a master of humor, satire , and general wackiness. Reality? Nothing more than a skein over something else -- and something else was always changing.

Here, from ``The Monsters," Cordovir and Hum stand watching a ship (carrying humans, naturally) settle on its tail of fire to nonEarth.

`` `Shall we go down and have a closer look? ' Hum asked.

`` `All right. I think we have time -- wait! What day is this? '

``Hum calculated silently, then said, `The fifth day of Luggat. '

`` `Damn, ' Cordovir said. `I have to go home and kill my wife. '

`` `It's a few hours before sunset, ' Hum said. `I think you have time to do both.' "

Long before fantasy and science fiction broke through to the mainstream, Sheckley had leapt the barricades and dashed off into the streets on a solo mission . ``Untouched by Human Hands," ``The Tenth Victim," ``Mindswap," ``Immortality, Inc.," ``If at Faust You Don't Succeed" -- year after year, title after title: freewheeling humor worthy of Mark Twain, social satire and extrapolation, stories of space travel fully as comic and fraught as those of Stanislaw Lem, picaresques that propel the very origins of the English-language novel into outer space and the future. Sheckley was our Voltaire, and he is greatly missed.

If recognized at all, Horace McCoy is identified as the author of ``They Shoot Horses , Don't They?" The movie, of course -- few have actually read the novel.

A newspaperman and veteran of the same Black Mask magazine that midwifed Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler , and much of the new American crime fiction, McCoy worked for a time as an actor and screenwriter in Hollywood, publishing ``They Shoot Horses , Don't They?," his first novel, in 1935 . ``No Pockets in a Shroud" (1936) cribbed from his journalism experience to tell the story of a doomed crusading reporter, just as his third, ``I Should Have Stayed Home," springboarded off his experiences in Hollywood. Neither did well; both remain creditable novels.

Then in 1948, shortly after McCoy learned of his high reputation in France despite little success in the United States, came ``Kiss Tomorrow Good bye," the tale of a Phi Beta Kappa university graduate turned hardcase criminal. Here, taking up his recurring theme of a divided self, McCoy produced a second masterpiece, a novel every bit as lyrical as it is brutal, appealing, and repellent in equal measure.

Still, ``They Shoot Horses , Don't They?" is likely to remain the book by which McCoy is remembered. Among the bleakest, most resolutely existential novels ever written, it belongs up there on the shelf with James M. Cain's ``The Postman Always Rings Twice," Hammett's ``Red Harvest ," and a handful of others that serve as landmarks of the time when the truth of the great American dream first began burning holes through the paper.

The French, as Geoffrey O'Brien notes in ``Hardboiled America," saw ``what no American critic of the time had noticed -- that McCoy had penetrated deeper than anyone into the zero state at the heart of the hardboiled novel. He had produced a sharp, dry, arbitrary kind of book, a book poised so precisely on the edge of the real that it seems to cancel itself out."

Much as McCoy is remembered, if at all, for ``They Shoot Horses , Don't They?," most of those who know Edgar Pangborn's name remember him only for ``A Mirror for Observers." And well they might: It is a miraculous book, truly one of a kind, and one about which it is virtually impossible to say enough good things. Tender, lyrical, sad , and hopeful, suffused with a rare humanity, it limns the whole of humankind's nature -- everything we are, everything we are not, everything we might be.

For centuries, we learn in the Prelude, Martians have been observing us. A long-lived, diminishing race , they do not become involved, they only observe. And now one of them, Elmis, who loves mankind perhaps just a bit too much, comes among us, to live close by the child genius Angelo Pontevecchio, who may or may not be mankind's savior. Set against Elmis, against humanity, is Namir the Abdicator.

Like much fantastic literature, the story is archetypical, a battle of good and evil. But that is only the frame . The brilliance of the story, its true genius and grace, lies not in the scope but in the smallness of it, in its concentration on the lives observed so intimately by Elmis. The novel is, like those lives, a small miracle.

Pangborn's other works include an outstanding historical novel, ``Wilderness of Spring"; a meditation on conformist morality, ``The Trial of Callista Blake"; and two novels marking his return to science fiction, ``Davy" and its prequel, ``The Judg ment of Eve." You may not find them easily, but persist and you will, I promise, thank me.

James Sallis's ``Cripple Creek" is out from Walker ; ``Drive" is out from Harcourt.