BOOK REVIEW / THRILLER : From Ordinary Man to Ruthless Killer : A SIMPLE PLAN: A Novel <i> by Scott Smith</i> ; Alfred A. Knopf $21, 329 pages

When James M. Cain published “The Postman Always Rings Twice” in 1934, a critic at the New York Herald Tribune--Franklin Pierce Adams--thought the novel so good he reprinted the first chapter in its entirety.

The opening passage of “A Simple Plan” raises hopes of similar success, for while less dramatic and more conventional, it, too, briskly and forcefully locates the narrator in a particular place and time.

It’s soon apparent, however, that Scott Smith, at least in this first novel, is not playing in Cain’s league. The publisher of “A Simple Plan” is pushing the book as a first-rate thriller, but don’t believe it: Smith, aiming to trace an ordinary man’s transformation into a cold-blooded killer, only succeeds in demonstrating that it’s impossible for a book to be hard-boiled and soft-boiled at the same time.

“A Simple Plan” begins with Hank Mitchell’s first-person account of his parents’ death, possibly by suicide, in a car accident that occurred just as the family’s Ohio farm was about to go under. Hank and his brother, Jacob, have had to get rid of the farm to pay its debts, but the sale doesn’t affect Hank deeply because he’s got other things to fall back on--a pregnant wife, a house in the suburbs, a steady job as the town feed store’s head accountant. Things are different for Jacob; unattractive, unambitious and unemployed, he’s a perpetually lost soul whose only friend is a low-life blowhard named Lou.

Hank, Jacob and Lou are very different people, and their lives become intertwined only because, while attempting to corral Jacob’s dog on a snowy afternoon, they stumble across a small airplane that’s crashed in the woods. The plane is apparently undiscovered and unreported, and contains, besides the dead pilot, more than $4 million in cash.

Hank, being an upstanding member of the community, at first wants to turn the money in. Lou, though, quickly persuades Jacob that the money is theirs for the taking, an argument that eventually appeals to Hank as well. Hank suggests he hide the money for six months, and should no one step forward to claim the money within that time, the three then divide it up.

Hank’s “simple plan” goes awry almost instantly, of course, with both Lou and Hank breaking their promised silence--each tells his wife about the money--and Lou subsequently losing a major stake while gambling.

But the real problems begin only when Hank, for decidedly implausible reasons, decides to return some of the money to the airplane, and Jacob, waiting by the car, panics at the approach of a local farmer. Jacob knocks him down, and Hank, who returns to find his brother standing over a motionless body, decides he must protect Jacob by disposing of the corpse. The farmer, though, predictably revives, and when Hank strangles him to complete the job Jacob accidentally began, the reader knows Hank is sure to kill again.

In outline form this could be a story by Cain or, more appropriately, Jim Thompson (“The Grifters,” “The Getaway,” etc). But Smith doesn’t do with the story what Cain and Thompson did so effectively: capture the novice criminal’s fear, his desperation, his flashes of regret, his growing craziness.

Like most of Thompson’s criminals, Hank begins to act more psychopathologically, but he grows oblivious and lethargic rather than counterproductively rash or near-demented. Hank always seems to present his decisions--to secrete the money, to burn it if things go wrong, to tell his wife about the money, to kill--as reasonable at the time, but in almost every case it takes the reader only a few seconds to come up with a better alternative. Hank, consequently, often acts like a marionette, instructed by the author to do foolish things at various points solely to set up scenes farther down the road.

What’s most irksome about “A Simple Plan,” however, is the unavoidable sense that Smith wrote it with a sale to Hollywood in mind. (It happened: Mike Nichols bought the rights, and Smith--who has made a million dollars from the book so far, according to New York magazine--is currently working on the screen adaptation.)

The book reads like a back-formation, the novelization of an already existing movie in which the plot and characters have been massaged and homogenized to appeal as broadly as possible, constructed according to visual impact rather than internal credibility.

By now it is, perhaps, an old story: the talented young writer who has internalized movie methods and movie culture so deeply that he believes the complexities and subtleties of written language to be no more than icing on the cake. Even Cain, who for much of his life was little better than a hack journalist, knew better.