Leonard Cocks a Snook at Hollywood : GET SHORTY <i> by Elmore Leonard (Delacorte: $18.95; 291 pp.) </i>

Long before he earned his present eminence for his swift and sharp-tongued contemporary mysteries, Elmore Leonard knew Hollywood and Hollywood knew him, initially as a writer of Westerns. Among the movies based on his novels were “The Moonshine War” and “Mr. Majestyk” (both of which he also scripted), the Martin Ritt/Paul Newman “Hombre,” “Valdez Is Coming” and “3:10 to Yuma.”

Leonard’s impressions of Hollywood from the early ‘60s forward were evidently indelible and amused, and he has drawn upon them for his new novel, “Get Shorty,” a book that Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West might have written if they had decided to join forces (an engrossing idea if there ever was one).

Goodness does not abound in “Get Shorty”; it seldom does in Leonard’s work. Hardly anyone, including his protagonist Chili Palmer, is without sin. Chili is a loan shark, previously operating out of Miami. He is a collector whose main weapon is a steely glare that melts the most obstinate defaulters.

There are deadlier operatives than Chili, plus other lowlifes and a couple of film stars with large but unsupportable opinions of themselves. Yet with all potential for explosive nastiness, Leonard’s tone by his standards is rather mellow, although at no sacrifice in interest or suspense.

His strength has always been in the vividness of his characters and the unpredictability of their interactions, with the narrative constructed primarily of colloquial speech. This is especially true in “Get Shorty,” a satirical portrait of what might pass as second-level or possibly third-level Hollywood: significantly below the solemn majesty and abundant funding of the majors but with the really big time so tantalizingly near you can sniff the expensive colognes and the coke.

Leonard’s pleasing conceit is that a man with a background in loan-sharking for a crime family, a streetwise cat accustomed to raising hob with law and order generally, is ideally suited to become a writer-producer abounding in stories and equipped with the muscle to sustain his point of view when he takes a meeting.

“Get Shorty” is not without violence, which includes a smash finale high in the Hollywood Hills. But it is at heart a portrait of the community, less angry than “Day of the Locust” but not less devastating in its tour of the industry’s soiled follies and the gaminess beneath the grandeurs.

The plot is customarily intricate. Chili has come to Las Vegas in pursuit of a deadbeat who has fled with the proceeds of a faked death. For a Vegas pal, while he continues to seek the deadbeat, Chili agrees to collect a quarter-mil gambling debt from a small-time producer named Harry Zimm. Zimm is trying to move up from horror films. He is romancing Karen, a sometime horror queen, and trying to put together a package with an arrogant but short-brained stud star called Michael Weir. Chili moves in with, or on, this little family.

Leonard’s recall isn’t totally perfect--Chasen’s doesn’t do lunch, for example--but his ears, eyes and recall are so nearly perfect as makes no matter.

“Here, wherever you look it’s something different,” Chili says. “Like Times Square. I think the movie business is the same way. There aren’t any rules--you know, anybody saying this’s how you have to do it. What’re movies about? They’re all different--except the ones that’re just like other movies that made money. . . . The movie business, you can do anything you want because there’s nobody in charge.”

The villain, Bo Catlett, explains to Chili the simple matter of doing a script: “You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page and you write ‘Fade out’ and that’s the end, you’re done.”

“Then what do I need you for?” Chili asks him.

There is nothing like knowing the territory.