BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Hold Onto Your Hat for This Wild Ride : DRAWING DEAD <i> by Pete Hautman</i> ; Simon & Schuster, $21, 285 pages

Imagine the classic film “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” but with tightly drawn, psychologically provocative characters. Or “The Sting,” with even more plot twists. Imagine “The Hustler” centered around comic books instead of pool tables, “A Big Hand for the Little Lady,” when the “little lady” in question is a tough-talking, tender-hearted, leather-clad female biker, “Topkapi” set in Minneapolis.

It’s little wonder that “Drawing Dead,” a romp of a first novel by Pete Hautman--who writes nonfiction for children under the pen name of Peter Murray--evokes comparison with highly entertaining movies. The book is fast-paced and highly visual, leaving this reader as breathless as if he had just stepped off a particularly steep roller-coaster ride.

As the multilayered schemes and scams begin to unfold, the only choice is to hang on for the duration and hope for the best.

The intricate story is impossible to summarize without revealing too much, but the cast of players alone is worth the price of admission. Joe Crow is an ex-cop, reformed coke head and card shark who wistfully pines for a lake cabin in northern Minnesota--if he ever gets his life in gear and gets out of debt.

One way to get that cabin might happen if Rich “Dickie” Wicky, “a blond Buddy Hackett,” wealthy and dumb enough to be everybody’s No. 1 mark, pays off his gambling debt to Crow.

The odds against that are weighted by the presence of Catfish, Wicky’s wife, a woman whose sexual appetite makes ordinary promiscuity seem like virtue. Even the streetwise Crow is mesmerized when he meets her for the first time.

“Something about her features--their relative size or shape, maybe--was alarming, as though at any moment he might discover that she had two different-color eyes (though both now looked solid black), or that her nose had the wrong number of nostrils (but he counted two), or that her teeth had been sharpened. And perhaps they had. He had the strong sense that her parents ought not to have met.”

Off in the wings, but aimed like an incoming missile, is Joe Cadillac, a small-time Chicago hood with a short fuse and a long arm: Freddy Wisnesky, “dumb as a stump. Tell him he’s got a fly on his nose and he’ll knock himself out trying to slap it.”

And then there’s a klutzy pair of comic-book counterfeiters (one of whom claims to have invented the lava lamp and been Question Mark in the old band Question Mark and the Mysterians); a gangster’s moll who “had a file of brief, circular conversations in her head, with a special variation for everyone she knew”; a determined rural realtor named Jimbo, and Crow’s conniving, hard-drinking father, all of whom decidedly complicate the picture even further.

Most interesting of all is Laura Debrowski, the above-mentioned biker. Smart, outwardly cool, brave and independent, she’s more than a match for any adversary and never shies from a fight. Here’s the conclusion of her first encounter with the predatory Joe Cadillac:

“His face hit the rug, then something came down on the back of his neck, pushing his face into the thick pure-wool pile of the hand-woven Persian rug, three thousand bucks, right off the truck. From the corner of his eye, he could see the sole of her boot.”

“Drawing Dead” is a difficult book to pigeonhole--mainly because it’s so good. A caper novel loaded with action, humor and close calls, it consistently surprises by transcending the genre in the manner of Elmore Leonard’s best work.

Pete Hautman manages, with clipped, original observations, to create believable men and women, people defined by both quirks and shortcomings.

Against the backdrop of what, in a lesser writer’s hands, might be formula fiction, he establishes a sense of place, class and time with indelible accuracy. An impressive debut.