Clickety-Clack

By Christopher Porterfield

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE

by JOHN GODEY 316 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Glamorous trains are disappearing fast, in fact as well as fantasy. About the only vehicle left for adventure on rails is the big-city subway. It can rattle along divertingly enough, as in the famous chase sequence in the movie The French Connection. But as used in a novel like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the subway car as dramatic conveyance produces the sinking, shrinking feeling of a subgenre in decline. Once we roared across frontiers on the Orient Express; now we lurch along on a Lexington Avenue local.

"Pelham one two three" is New York City subway jargon for the train that sets out from the Pelham Bay Park terminal in The Bronx at 1:23 p.m. In John Godey's "What if...?" exercise, the front car of such a train is hijacked by four highly organized, submachine-gun-toting terrorists. They hold the motorman and 16 passengers hostage while their leader negotiates with the city government for a $1,000,000 ransom. The hostages do not panic; after all, they represent that well-rounded social group -- a call girl, a wise old man, a black militant, a housewife and her children -- that has survived so many capsized ships, stalled elevators and jet liners piloted by Dean Martin. They seem to realize, as the reader surely does, that eventually order will be restored in a shower of bullets, heroics and heavy ironies.

Heaven and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority know that Godey's plot is not far removed from the reality of the contemporary urban nightmare. But Godey tries to whip up extra credibility by introducing each new twist in the drama with a flourish of fact-filled three-by-five cards. Want to know how many miles of track there are in the New York subway system? Where Alfred Ely Beach's 1867 private subway tunnel is? What it means to "jump a block"? Maybe not, but Godey is going to tell you. He cannot even write a scene about the mayor of New York without giving a history of Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence.

Too bad such authentic research could not be applied to Godey's characters. His people seem little more than hollow molds waiting to be filled by some Hollywood casting director. In a way this is fitting. In print form, Pelham One Two Three is really only a short connecting ride between the scary movies that seem to have inspired it and the scary movie that it all too clearly aspires to be.

--Christopher Poterfield

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