BOOK REVIEW : A Romp Through World of Horse Racing : THE WRONG HORSE: An Odyssey Through the American Racing Scene <i> by William Murray</i> ; Simon & Schuster $20; 224 pages

Like Hollywood, the racetrack reels you in with a macabre lure: It kills you with hope, then gets away with murder. No wonder writers line up to cash in at both windows.

Unlike Hollywood, though, the track tends to make sense. There’s always tomorrow to get even. There’s always another race to play, a better piece of information to help you play it and a happier outcome if you play it just right.

Racetracks are places where regardless of the size of your portfolio, the prevailing--indeed the unifying--desire under the paddock elms (or maples, or laurels, or oaks) is please, lord, let me go home with the double (or exacta, or trifecta or Pick Six). Those who do get to count themselves kings of infinite space, at least until the starting gate opens on the next encounter and hope again begins playing tricks with otherwise rational psyches.

William Murray--like Damon Runyon and Red Smith of the past and like Dick Francis, Jim Murray and Bill Barich in flourish today--can certainly count himself among racing’s literary royals. With his pen and with his pocketbook, the eminent author of the New Yorker’s letters from Italy and a score of volumes of fiction and nonfiction has had a long, intriguing, sometimes prosperous, sometimes frustrating but always fruitful romance with the sport of kings.

He’s bet on horses, owned horses, pondered horses, loved horses, admired horses and, over 40-some years of wandering the windows, the grandstands and the backside barns, even wanted to kill a few. All of that comes with the territory, and all of that gets a workout in “The Wrong Horse.”

Subtitled “An Odyssey Through the American Racing Scene,” it is a fascinating mix of autobiography, anecdote, observation, profile and appreciation. To be sure, it’s an odd amalgamation of a volume, a hybrid that needs the concept of odyssey simply to hold its disparateness together. When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s a little less so, it just feels like a router taking a breather down the backstretch before opening up a notch to make its final move.

Murray is strongest when he’s most personal. His tales of the emotional and financial investment required in owning, feeding, coddling and cajoling a thoroughbred are hilarious and delightful. So are the ones that trace his introduction to the sport, when he was 16, through his cousin Isolde’s dashing husband, Harry, and the inconveniences that attended coupling his military basic training late in World War II with the more pressing duty of following and wagering on recent Racing Hall of Fame inductee Stymie.

The writing is rich with character, detail and history. He brings the little universes of Del Mar, Agua Caliente and the bullrings of the county-fair circuit to life.

Yet Murray’s prose feels stiff in the presence of Bill Shoemaker, a little pretentious in its psychologizing on the relationship of females and their equines and just flat in his windy analysis of racing on the East Coast versus racing on the West.

But put a plunger in his sights and Murray’s as sure a thing as a show bet in a three-horse field. The bittersweet affection with which he holds those who are held together by the fraying threads of misplaced hope--those “regarded as slightly unclean social lepers who ought to be compelled to wear warning bells around their necks”--are obvious.

One notorious loser, Bender, is “the kind of person who believes he could fly, if he’d just flap his arms hard enough.” If you’ve been to the track, you’ve seen thousands of Benders, thousands of times.

Another, Sour Sam, a hard knocker who sadly appears only in the book’s first chapter, “claims to have made a good living this way for years, but it has to be noted that he drives an ancient Pontiac that sounds as if a reggae combo is tuning up under the hood . . . and has never been seen to smile.”

He has “no official existence. He has never paid income taxes, does not possess a Social Security card, has no medical insurance or retirement plan, has never voted, does not own a credit card, keeps his operating money in a shoe box under his bed and deposits what savings he has with a brother who tends bar in Las Vegas. In the modern sense, Sam is a non-person, which helps to explain his habitual look of restrained despair.”

In other words, there’s hope in Sam’s heart but no wings on the feet of the nags his money has spent a lifetime trying to encourage. Hope may be deadly, but a writer like Murray can keep him--and his world--brimming with life.