October, 1987: Remembering the Crash : BLACK MONDAY The Catastrophe of October 19, 1987 . . . and Beyond <i> by Tim Metz (William Morrow: $17.95; 288 pp.) </i>

It’s not always easy to wring high drama from a tale of economic crisis. The key actors tend to be stolid, middle-aged guys in business suits. Often they deliver their important lines as they recline in their office chairs, talking on the phone or in other similarly prosaic settings. Too, writing about the financial world means explaining a lot of complicated terms, such as interest-rate swaps and dynamic hedging, that may numb the minds of the most committed lay readers.

Tim Metz struggles bravely with these difficulties in “Black Monday,” his account of the century’s biggest, though not most important, stock market crash. A long-time editor and writer at the Wall Street Journal, Metz has access to all the important players, and he seems, initially, dedicated to keeping the non-financial reader engaged.

He puts the crash into proper context by filling us in on the developments of the 1980s business world, with its merger dealers, insider traders and junk bond barons. As his narrative of the crash unfolds, he ably illustrates its impact with vivid tales of hapless investors. We meet elderly Mr. Yee, of New York’s Chinatown, who loses his family savings because he will not abandon the risky stock-options plays that have earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars and the admiration of his cribbage partners. We learn of a father, mercifully unnamed, who has invested a $100,000 insurance settlement from his daughter’s disfiguring auto accident and lost all.

Every book needs a bombshell, and Metz’s is a whopping conspiracy theory. He suggests that government regulators, exchange officials, and the “market makers” who sustain trading are parties to a huge--and, until now, undetected--market manipulation scheme. On Tuesday, Oct. 20, when the market had slowed almost to halt, these participants made it appear that prices were starting to again rise, and by so doing they persuaded big investors to join in trading.

Metz provides details of the civil war on Wall Street. The crash re-ignites the struggle between old-school investors, the advocates of buying and holding stocks, and a newer corps, who use computers and the new stock-derived investments, such as options and index-futures, to carry out the so-called program trading that the traditionalists blame for worsening the collapse.

The key to understanding the crash lies in these newer forms of trading, carried on between the stock market in New York and the futures market in Chicago. Metz doesn’t hold back laying out the details of this relationships. And this makes “Black Monday” a riveting read for those with some background in the working of the markets. But others may find that the book, like trading on Oct. 20, grinds to a near-halt as Metz explains the connections of gears, cogs and levers in the global market clockwork.

Metz is fascinated with the important organization that employs him. But most readers are likely to be puzzled at his lengthy accounts of the routines and politics at the Journal, where, we are told, the virtuous rise and the merely ambitious are frustrated. The average reader probably has very limited curiousity about the details of the newspaper’s layout procedures, production or pension plans.

As these matters are explored, other questions beg answers. The author doesn’t offer much more than circumstantial evidence to support his manipulation theory, which at least some of the participants deny. Hardly broached are such issues as: What did this mean for the nation’s economy? Could it happen again? Have the system’s weaknesses been fixed? If all the answers aren’t yet in, they seem at least worth a stab.