A Back-Country Shakespeare : THE ONES YOU DO <i> By Daniel Woodrell</i> , <i> (Henry Holt and Co</i> .<i> : $19.95; 212 pp.) </i>

The inhabitants of Daniel Woodrell’s fiction often have a streak that’s not just mean but savage; yet physical violence does not dominate his books. What does dominate is a seasoned fatalism.

In “The Ones You Do,” someone is robbed of the $47,000 he needs to pay off bad bets, and killings will ensue, but death tends to be faced with ironic quipping. “I’m gonna guess pain is in the forecast for me, huh, Lunch?” says protagonist John X. Shade when his pursuer shows up. This is the best of Woodrell’s gift (and he has a considerable one, the kind of brilliance that’s often and oxymoronically called “dark”)--to make us buy the wit as natural companion to the savagery. That gift frees him to treat us to the irresistible dialogue his characters pour forth; they’re virtually all back-country (or trailer-park or slum) Shakespeares.

“You are not a clean fit with my future,” says the note John X.’s wife sends him via their 11-year-old daughter, Etta. “The money I have borrowed for good to invest in my dreams was only a killer’s loot.” What she means is she’s stolen the $47,000 from one Lunch Pomphrey, “a thirtyish badass” who kills for both pleasure and money. Only 5-foot-5, with a treasured red VW bug and a collection of jailhouse tattoos (“Cubs Win!” says his left forearm), Lunch is a villain of strange facets whose inexorability and terse menace recall Faulkner’s Flem Snopes. This dangerous man keeps his cigarette habit to seven Salems a day, and as he tracks John X. Shade, we grow curiously sympathetic to his sad backwoods past. “You know I’m remorseless this way,” he half-apologizes to the old acquaintances who cross his feral path.

The masterfully drawn bad seed is probably the best of the fine fistful of characters here, but all are memorable. Certain of them, like Stew, the man John X. cuckolded many years ago (“You put a shadow over every kiss I ever got from my wife”), are so economically created it’s hard to believe their staying power. Rather than wish this book were twice as long, one hopes to let it wash out of memory, affording the pleasure of meeting them all again.

The plot is blissfully simple--John X. takes his young daughter and runs from Mobile on Alabama’s Redneck Riviera to St. Bruno, his ancestral home in the Louisiana bayou. Near the book’s end, we find he hasn’t run far enough. But once arrived, the burnt-out pool hustler continues his steady drinking and philosophical grumbling. “Women younger than yourself, and beautiful,” he muses, “. . . doesn’t that make the ticking clock an ominous . . . bully to your mind?”

John X. roots around in memory and mingles with his sons Tip (a bar owner who takes him in), Francois (the youngest, estranged) and Rene. Rene is known simply as Shade, for he has been the protagonist in two previous Woodrell novels set in the fictional town of St. Bruno (“Under the Bright Lights” and “Muscle for the Wing”). A faintly poetic tough guy who happens to be a St. Bruno cop (in the midst of 90 days’ suspension during the events of this book), he’s mostly in the background, a wounded presence with current girlfriend Nicole digging into his sexual and emotional vulnerabilities. Not your standard crime-novel hero.

In fact, with this book, Woodrell brings his St. Bruno saga into a life that’s outside of genre, while keeping all of genre’s low pleasures along with the high. When a hotel clerk is asked for a bottle, he responds, “You need a broad to go with that, amigo?” The sensibility is noir , as in Chandler and Ross MacDonald and Jim Thompson, yet Woodrell enforces a ripe sense of place so efficiently that the estimable James Lee Burke will probably find himself sounding a bit prolix in describing a similar world.

Every so often, his people’s rude eloquence almost overreaches. “Ice cold beer on a sweaty day sure ‘nough proves there once was saints afoot on this earth,” says young Etta, and a barfly asks, “Where’s a kid get stuff like that ?” “From me,” is John X.’s reply. “She’s a little echo of my own words.” It’s the right answer, for reader and barfly both, because we get to know this quietly heartbreaking wreck of a man partly through the buzz-cut, ‘90s child who’s fascinating but seldom merely cute. His sons are skeptical but honor the blood tie; they remember the old man most fondly for his trick of sneakily hollering oaths at local toughs during horn-honking drive-bys in his ’51 Ford, “slurring the words cheerily into a great, indecipherable, melted phrase.”

The oddments of behavior stick out as they do in the black tragicomedies of Walker Percy, or as they do in life itself. The man Lunch victimizes by debauching his wife can’t believe they did it in sight of the neighbor’s “children, their little bitty children.” Harshness is everywhere, but so are moments of hard-won forgiveness.

Some may find the book’s conclusion a bit murky, but Woodrell makes us read it almost prayerfully as he clues us in--a tribute to how much we care for the book’s broken-down hero. “Honesty can siphon off a few regrets and resentments if you tap into it,” John X. tells Rene Shade. That’s why we root so fervently for John X. toward the delicately wrought but not unsatisfying conclusion. Daniel Woodrell has tapped into a novelist’s honesty, and lucky for us, he’s remorseless that way.