Quiz Show Quandaries : ALL THE RIGHT ANSWERS<i> by Robert Noah (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $17.95; 294 pp.) </i>

Veteran television producer Robert Noah has, after all these years, produced a novel about television--a fast-moving and highly entertaining novel--and it seems obvious he has heeded the classic advice to “write what you know.” The parallels between Noah’s life and his fictional protagonists are hard to ignore.

Noah was executive producer of “Twenty-One,” the popular TV quiz show of the 1950s that turned out to be mostly rigged. The narrator of Noah’s novel, David Beach, helps produce a ‘50s quiz show, called “Face to Face,” in which contestants are supplied in advance with correct answers. Rarely has the fiction writer’s first-page disclaimer (“All the events recounted herein are the products of the author’s imagination”) seemed quite so titillating--or so mandatory. Yes, the reader agrees to agree, this is indeed “a work of fiction”--now let’s get on with the show!

Fledgling reporter David Beach, forced by a New York newspaper strike to seek temporary non-journalistic employment, gets a job as a writer on a Saturday morning TV puppet show. The temporary job becomes a way of life, and the puppet show is soon forgotten as Beach is caught up in the planning of another program his boss has pitched: a question-and-answer contest that pays off in unprecedentedly huge amounts of cash. “Who said the prizes had to be a hundred or two hundred dollars, the way they’d always been? Why not an amount that could really change their lives? Ten thousand dollars, say. Or even fifty.”

Beach’s boss is Stu Leonard, an exasperating personage who feels free to show up in his employee’s life at all hours, pounding on his apartment door bearing take-out feasts that he alone consumes. Physically huge, he manipulates those around him with flattery, bluster, persuasiveness and sheer will. He’s the sort of “creator” whose “creativity” consists of editing others (“I may not be able to write, but I tell you something, I can find the problems and tell you how to fix them”). Secrecy is second nature to Stu, and honesty is only one of several policies available. “Sometimes he’d invent things for no better reason than to try on an attitude, walk up to the three-way mirror and see how he looked in it.”

“Face to Face” isn’t conceived as a fake--it just works out better that way. With great skill, Noah shows how the desire for a suspenseful and highly rated show leads inexorably to the deceptions that become the program’s very essence. In addition, the novelist brings to vivid life the New York TV scene of the 1950s, a world of nerve-wracking live broadcasts, hovering executives and powerful sponsors and advertising agencies. Even the blacklist makes a cameo appearance. A wonderful cast of characters passes before Noah’s three-camera set-up: behind-the-scenes types, network and product honchos and those all-important contestants. Doorman to academic, “no matter what background they came from, no matter what (Stu) asked them to do, there was . . . no one he’d ever gone after who had ever turned him down.”

In the end, though, it’s the contestants who bring this high-stakes house of cards crashing down on its creators’ heads. This is a catastrophe David Beach says he’s been dreading all along, but it seems to do little to transform him. No lessons are drawn, no answers (finally) are given. In this sense, the novel disappoints. We yearn for more than an entertaining account of how it all happened. We want some sort of dramatic catharsis, even if real life didn’t provide one.

“All the Right Answers,” with its behind-the-headlines theme and its spirited evocation of the Manhattan broadcasting world of 30 years ago, resembles an ambitious entry of one of the better live-TV drama shows from that period, “Studio One” or “Playhouse 90.” Like a lot of those plays from TV’s “Golden Age,” it seems to run out of gas in the final act. It doesn’t conclude so much as it comes to the end of its time period. At least it doesn’t buckle under pressure with an out-of-nowhere happy final curtain (another common failing of the “Golden Age”). “All the Right Answers” remains true to its insider’s vision, even as it ends with a whimper.