There are lessons to be learned from the beautiful losers in Dead Boys, a collection of a dozen short stories by debut author Richard Lange about men on the fringes of civilized society, hanging on by their fingertips. These stolen glimpses of bruised souls in a splintered city might also break your heart.

One thing is more than certain: These stories are among the best you'll read this year.

Lange's beat is Los Angeles, and the editorial transient has bounced hard through its trenches. To make the rent, he blue-penciled copy for Larry Flynt, crafted school textbooks and managed some influential heavy metal and radio magazines. At night, Lange would retire to a lonely typewriter, burning the midnight oil to fashion his sparse, bleak stories. Yet he didn't publish his first short story until he was 35 years old.

Influenced by the usual suspects - among them Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, as well as more contemporary crime writers like Charles Willeford and Richard Price - Lange has earned his critical acclaim. Nearly all these stories have been published in prestigious literary journals, and the best, Bank of America, was featured in The Best American Mystery Stories 2004.

Lange's mastery of the minimalist mold is startling. He rewrote a story every time it was rejected, so each is meticulously crafted: Imagine a sculptor freeing the graven image of a man from a block of stone. He strips away all the detritus to leave only austere, crime-tinged

renderings that might recall Raymond Carver - if he were partial to crystal meth instead of whiskey.

It's a risky proposition to find a "bad guy" among these criminals. Take John Q, the house-painter turned bank robber from Bank of America. When the ringleader recruits him at the local unemployment office and muses, "I'll tell you what, getting by is killing me," it strikes a chord in the family man, who decides to join up for a retirement score. But the poetry of desperation isn't pretty and even the action-packed robbery is remembered with aching regret.

"Boom!" he says. "There I am, standing in one of those same banks on legs that are shaking like a pair of Slinkys. I've got a gun in my hand and pantyhose pulled over my head, and when I yell, 'Get down on the floor!' you'd think it was the voice of God rumbling out of a thundercloud, the way the customers throw themselves at my feet. I'd always imagined that when you crossed the line you saw it coming, but it turned out to be more like gliding over the equator on the open sea. Don't let them kid you, it's nothing momentous, going from that to this."

The grass is no greener in Loss Prevention, where a bored security guard patrols an all- hours supermarket. His thoughts wander from Neil Young songs to a comical, lewd fantasy about Scarlett Johansson. He's quickly brought back to reality when a botched robbery earns him a shotgun wound. The ambulance carries him away, high on morphine and his own lingering mortality: "The siren bawls, announcing my departure, and I wave out the windows, flashing everyone the thumbs-up, all the strangers who have lined the rainy streets to see me off, at last, at last, the gracious Grand Marshall of my very own parade."

There are a few real lowlifes to contrast average Joes like our security guard, but everyone here is painted in shades of gray. The residents of a halfway house stalk a maddening bird that mimics the electronic chirp of their telephone - Poe's raven transposed to the projects. When they kill it, they unearth a deeper grief in the process.

In Long Lost, an animated ex-convict named Karl Wright reappears in the life of his half-brother Spencer, a tightly wound proofreader whose jealousy of Karl overwhelms him. "When I was a boy, I thought I would grow up to be some kind of poet," Spencer confesses. "Now, when it's ridiculous, my heroes are bank robbers and vengeful desperadoes. 'Don't be surprised if you wake up one morning and I'm gone,' I tell Judy. 'If I just disappear.' God, does that make her laugh."

The math never adds up for these guys. Every scheme, manipulation and double-cross costs them dearly. Things get worse if you let them, and these Dead Boys have invited all their demons to stay.

But ever so rarely, we see a wispy glimmer of hope, a hint of how people live with the mistakes they've made. A barfly loses his dead buddy's ashes, substituting barbecue coals, but finds love with the deceased's daughter. A well-meaning father figure snatches a boy away from his selfish, hysterical mother. Even our bank robber embraces his wife and child and steals away, if not completely clean, murmuring his prayer: "Safe - oh, please let us be safe - for at least another day."

This is disquieting, heartfelt writing by a gifted writer, though these emotional train wrecks may not be for everyone. The stories are unashamedly loaded with crime, boozing, drugs and other questionable pursuits, and the collection's forlorn, male-centric point of view may deter gentler spirits. But anyone left who's keen on noirish flicks like Heat or Chinatown, or finds kindred spirits in Thomas McGuane, Denis Johnson or Charles Bukowski, will find comrades among these dead men. They are, after all, simply decent people who do bad things. In the end, that's all of us, one way or another.

How to sum up? Borrow a line from the first story, Fuzzyland: "Greek tragedies, man."

Of note

• Dead Boys is the first of a two-book deal with Little, Brown. The second will be his novel, The Kissproof World, a title cribbed from a line in the Dylan Thomas poem, When, Like a Running Grave.

Clayton Moore is a freelance writer whose work appears in Kirkus Reviews, Bookslut and other publications. He comments on genre fiction at claywriting.blogspot.com. He lives in Massachusetts.