Let It Bleed : EVERYBODY SMOKES IN HELL; By John Ridley; Alfred A. Knopf; 240 pp., $23

Tragedy and comedy, according to the ancient Greeks, were the bookends of the world, neat divisions in the realm of dramatic possibility with satire lying somewhere in between. Nowadays these distinctions are often blurred. Violence, the harbinger of the woeful denouement, is leavened by humor. Witness the spate of films that followed the success of “Pulp Fiction,” “Fargo” and “To Die For,” stories that play murder for laughs, mayhem for pratfall.

John Ridley is not far from this territory. Author of “Stray Dogs” and “Love is a Racket,” novels whose characters deadpan over the most nasty turn of events, Ridley seems to have a knack for capturing the comic-tragic, tragic-comic lessons of life that seem so prevalent in this half of the 20th century.

Yet what worked in his previous books is missing in his latest. “Everybody Smokes in Hell” is less a novel than it is a cartoon whose relentless pace and sadistic thuggery are unrelieved, apparently, by any deeper purpose. Once the blood has been washed from the sidewalks, the apartment building walls, the hotel rooms and bed sheets, it remains unclear why a story featuring sex, suicide, torture and murder under the pretext of gangland and Hollywoodland verisimilitude is played so lightly. Serious needn’t be unamusing, but amusing in this context ought to be serious. Anything less is gratuitous.

Paris Scott works the night shift behind the counter at a Hollywood convenience store. It’s a dead-end job for this black kid from Orange County who hoped to catch himself a break in the city. But Scott, like the other ne’er-do-wells that populate this story, lacks patience, and when he gets his hands on a DAT recording of the final songs of a rock star-turned-suicide, he thinks he’s on the fast track to a cool million. Mixed up with his newfound ambition is a kilo of scag his roommate just lifted and the forces of evil that are after him, each packing enough heat to see their way through the most recalcitrant negotiation.

Scott is an appealing character, who regrettably has to compete for space with a Hollywood agent wanna-be desperate for the tape; the hit man, who happens to be a woman, desperate for the drugs; and the drug czar’s homeboys thrown in to thicken the plot. As Scott hightails it for the sanctuary of Las Vegas, “Everybody Smokes in Hell” comes to resemble less a gangsta novel, which it might pretend to be, than a Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote road trip.

Ridley’s problem with the material is simple. Whoever’s telling this story, presumably Ridley himself, is not very likable. “Love Is a Racket” worked well on account of Jeffery Kittredge, the screenwriter whose down-and-out predicament is rather endearing. Cast through his jaded eyes, the city, its troubles and the violence he runs up against are serious, funny and smart. A wise-guy attitude can make the tragic more comic and vice versa. It worked for Raymond Chandler, and it’s worked for Ridley.

*

In “Everybody Smokes,” however, the narrator is M.I.A., a fly somewhere on the wall who makes the jokes and orchestrates the action with a particular cruelty. Take the death of Ian Germaine, lead singer of the grunge band Will of Instinct, whose missing DAT sets the story into gear. Washed-up, burned-out and altogether wasted, Jermaine tries blowing out his brains but the gun won’t fire, and when it finally does, it’s pointed at his foot. Hopping around his apartment, he slams through a plate-glass window, slips in his own blood, topples off his balcony, lands in an unspread pile of fertilizer and asphyxiates himself.

It’s a moment worthy of the Coen brothers, and to his credit, Ridley writes memorable scenes. The first chapter of “Everybody Smokes”--taking us from the heights of the Hollywood Hills to the back aisle of the convenience store--is close to perfect. But the total doesn’t add up. The body count leaves us indifferent, and the inner-city argot, mostly consisting most frequently of an epithet concerning an incestuous relationship with somebody’s mother, is wearisome. The view of women is misogynistic, and the author’s take on Los Angeles is strangely romantic and derisive. While nailing the cliches of this city, he perpetuates them too.

Ridley may think that the lesson of this little tale that “[T]he getting of things in life, was hard. Very, very difficult. Dying, making people dead--that took no effort at all”-is enough of a payoff, but he hasn’t connected the fate of his characters to anything beyond these pages, and he doesn’t seem to care. “Any similarities,” he writes before the novel begins, “between the miscreants in this story and the actual insipid degenerates who populate the city I hate more than cancer is [sic] purely coincidental,” thereby proving that ridicule and vitriol are more difficult to juggle than comedy and tragedy.

Nathanael West, of course, did it best. “It is hard to laugh,” he wrote of Los Angeles, “at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”

If only Ridley had sighed more and vented less.