Newport Beach Noir : THE HORSE LATITUDES <i> by Robert Ferrigno (William Morrow: $18.95; 288 pp.; 0-688-09060-5) </i>

The jacket blurb for “The Horse Latitudes” by Robert Ferrigno, a newspaper feature writer, tells us that the book “brilliantly subsumes the conventions of noir literature.” And from the beginning, it’s true, there’s no mistaking the mood indigo of Danny DiMedici, a retired dope dealer who pines for his ex-wife, Lauren Keil: “There were nights when Danny missed Lauren so bad that he wanted to take a fat man and throw him through a plate-glass window.”

Lauren, brainy as well as beautiful, is still out in the fast lane leading cutting-edge seminars for executives and scientists while Danny idles in a rented apartment in Newport Beach with a phony fireplace. Having had to kill a man, he’s lost his appetite for dealing. But don’t be fooled, he still has the moves.

When a dealer pal asks him to keep a Samoan bodyguard occupied, he stops just short of killing the guy. It’s a good fight scene, both of them slipping on the oil that happens to be on the pavement beside the Samoan’s car. Later, Danny notices his foot hurts from kicking the man and reflects that he’s getting too old for this kind of work.

There’s been a murder. A scientist involved in genetic experiments that employ fresh human fetuses has been discovered strung up and maimed in Lauren’s stylish, blood-spattered beach house, and Lauren can’t be found. There are a lot of subsidiary characters, including twin body builders named Boyd and Lloyd, both of them murderous morons. And there’s an old detective near retirement named Steiner who comes close to walking away with the book.

Ferrigno is a skillful writer, good with dialogue, who occasionally skimps in setting a scene so the reader experiences a sort of prose jump-out. But the real problem with “The Horse Latitudes” is that Danny isn’t revealed deeply enough to provide a narrative center of gravity. This is rather a designer noir novel where the bodies and the clothes, the cars and the food, the sex and the dope, the fine furniture and all the fancy talk stand in for the pleasures of a story that actively plumbs its depths.

Sometimes the trouble seems to be that Ferrigno’s journalistic instincts undercut those of the novelist in him. For example, as he tracks the thoughts of Det. Steiner’s female partner, Jane Holt, we learn that “Newport Beach was affluent, educated and white, a quiet, button-down community with three Ferrari dealerships and no public transportation. The supermarkets stocked Black Forest truffles and Dom Perignon, and commodities fraud was more common than murder . . . “--which is straight reportage in the guise of a character’s thought process.

Or consider that late in the book Danny visits a local cafe, and we learn more about the life of its proprietor, Grace, than we know about virtually any other character--and she doesn’t appear again. We never find out where Danny comes from, who his parents are or where he was educated. The book is all high-resolution front-story, and any back-story remains opaque. The scenes unfold like animate panels in a hip comic-strip. There’s no depth of field.

For this reason, perhaps, “The Horse Latitudes” doesn’t have much narrative momentum. Much of the action takes place off-stage. With all the elements in place for a high-tech thriller, the book dissolves into an oddly desultory Southern California travelogue cum character study with the moments of intimacy few and far between. Danny regrets his murder, yearns for Lauren and moves from scene to scene, from person to person, with a querulous aplomb that seems to lie on top of a couple of burning questions that never get asked.

Late in the book, Danny and Lauren briefly discuss the loss of one’s moral compass while on drugs. Lauren tells him: “Because of the drugs, I was exploring a different moral and logical universe. . . . “ Danny has his own memory of “a shimmy of right and wrong, good and bad. In that room, on that morning, it . . . made sense.”

It seems a shame Ferrigno didn’t pull out all his stops and try to fully render the moral valences implicit in such a moment. His skill indicates that he might have brought it off, and it’s exactly what this book needs: a highly charged novelistic epiphany involving moment-to-moment psychology and perception; who as opposed to all the insistent what.

Then too, the experience of temporary alchemy with irreversible consequences might just be the real noir behind this book’s high black gloss.