"A Pimp's Notes," by Giorgio Faletti The Italian writer Giorgio Faletti's first thriller, "I Kill," was a conventional serial-killer mystery, complete with a murderer who calls in clues to a local radio show and a detective who finds redemption from his tragic past by cracking the case. Apart from its length (more than 600 pages) and its setting (Monte Carlo), there was little to distinguish the book from dozens of similar noir exercises, but it sold millions of copies in Italy. Its English translation did not do as well as other recent European blockbusters, which surely explains why Faletti's sixth novel, "A Pimp's Notes," is the first since "I Kill" to be available in the American market. It would seem a more likely bet for breakout success, being both a shorter and a more sophisticated effort, and it's packed with all those ingredients - chiefly sexual violence and a plot gesturing vaguely at Europe's troubled political history - that audiences here tend to look for in a foreign favorite. The novel takes place in late-1970s Milan just after the Red Brigade kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, who had initiated a "historic compromise" with the Communist Party. The pimp of the title, an erstwhile womanizer, goes by the name of Bravo, the word of encouragement called out by three hired thugs as they brutally castrated him for sleeping with a mobster's girlfriend. Now Bravo pursues women primarily for their exchange value. But when a party for which he has supplied the entertainment is descended upon by armed assassins, he becomes caught up in a drama that eventually includes the Mafia, the Red Brigades and the Italian government functionaries who are fruitlessly negotiating for Moro's release. The story that follows is expertly plotted, complex without ever becoming convoluted. As the narrative proceeds, many small and unobtrusively planted seeds are brought to bloom in satisfying and surprising ways. So that's the good news. The bad news is that a lot of "A Pimp's Notes" is almost unreadable. Bravo narrates the book in the thriller genre's typical hard-boiled combination of nihilism and sentimentality. Occasionally, this commentary rises to the level of cliché ("Hope is just the last item in Pandora's box"), which can be oddly refreshing. The rest of the time, you actually wish Bravo were speaking in clichés, since then at least he would be comprehensible: "Little by little, my legs are standing in a hole that grows steadily deeper." There's a sense of rust and melancholy in the air that only failure can convey. This confession falls onto the pavement with the sound of tinkling coins. These aren't a few cherry-picked clunkers; sentences of this sort can be found throughout the book. About Milan's party scene, Faletti writes: "Every night can be considered a special occasion, until a midnight finally rolls around when everyone will realize that none of those nights was special at all. And that's not going to be a midnight to look forward to. Even allowing for problems in the translation, it's not clear how you'd clean up this mess. Ultimately, these are sentences that seem meant to be skimmed, not read - devised to take up room on the page so the carefully constructed elements of the plot aren't revealed too quickly. How can a book like Faletti's use a mixture of the shopworn and the nonsensical to achieve what it admittedly does? That's an interesting and complicated question, but I'd rather ask a different one: Why is it still considered a mistake to ask popular thrillers to achieve these effects with language readers would want to savor, with words that are more than just building blocks for the plot? It's a truism that genre boundaries are collapsing. In fact, there's been a great deal of talk about how much "serious" fiction writers can learn from writers of young adult novels or mysteries. This is all to the good. But now it might be time to set aside our reverse snobbery and admit that many genre writers have something to learn themselves, which is how to write. It may be too much to ask that a book like "A Pimp's Notes" contain more sentences worth reading twice, but it seems reasonable to ask that it contain fewer sentences not worth reading once. Christopher R. Beha is an associate editor at Harper's Magazine and the author, most recently, of a novel, "What Happened to Sophie Wilder."