Like the taut, well-muscled body of its protagonist, the lean novel The Killings of Stanley Ketchel is unexpectedly elegant. It's a masterful story about turn-of-the-century boxer Stanley Ketchel, charming for its roguish humor and slightly intimidating with its sharp narrative jabs that remind us of the dangerous world we've entered.

Based on the real story of Ketchel, Blake's novel follows the swift trajectory of the boxer's life, relating his rapid rise from his boyhood adventures as a rail-riding hobo, to his emergence as the nearly undefeatable Michigan Assassin, to his eventual status as the middleweight champion and to his tragic and sensationalized death.

In lesser hands, this rowdy tale might have remained merely overwrought melodrama, but Blake lends a poignant immediacy to Ketchel's life and persona, elevating his scrappy determination to near-mythic proportions without sacrificing the passionate human being at the center of the story.

The son of Polish immigrants who have settled in Michigan and work a dairy farm, Ketchel, born Stanislaus Kaicel, chafes at his father's brutish authority. At 16, he can no longer stand the near-physical abuse. After a scuffle between the two - resulting in a sobering incident that terrifies both of them - Ketchel flees his father's farm and sets out West.

An avid fan of dime novelettes, the young Ketchel is drawn to the adventure and freedom he believes the West promises, even as he knows the era of the frontier is over and he's missed the lawless exploits of figures like Billy the Kid.

"He felt it a low trick of fate that he'd been born a wink too tardy to ride in such legendary company," Blake writes. "He daydreamt of being a desperado, a long rider of renown, of being sought for interviews and accounts of his daring exploits."

At first, Ketchel survives as a hobo, riding the rails across the West, ultimately finding his way to Butte, Mont., a coarse mining town and the "roughest burg in the West." Drawn to the town for its reckless reputation and sexual permissiveness, Ketchel quickly finds himself a job as a bouncer at a dance saloon and enjoys a few brief affairs before settling into a playfully sensuous relationship with Kate Morgan, a dancer at one of Butte's numerous saloons.

After a few months in Butte, Ketchel makes his debut in the boxing ring by chance. Agreeing to substitute for an injured boxer in an amateur contest, he easily defeats his rival with his explosive punches and gets the attention of a local coach who admonishes Ketchel for his sloppy style but hopes to become his trainer.

After a tussle of egos, Ketchel agrees, setting in motion his rapid rise in the West's world of prizefighting, winning almost all his early fights by knockout and quickly becoming a notorious, if local, celebrity.

The novel's simplicity, of both form and focus, serves Ketchel's story well, fueling its compelling drive.

Ketchel's single-minded determination to win the middleweight title and retain it, as well as his later obsession with becoming the heavyweight champion, pulls us further and further into this unpredictable world of violence.

Without romanticizing its vulgar brutality, Blake lends a persuasive vitality to the personal battles that mark Ketchel's immersion in the ring. Each fight vividly recounts the varied physical abuses he endures to succeed in a sport largely indifferent to the vulnerabilities of the boxer's body.

Yet Ketchel is drawn to it for this very physicality, for its distillation of life into absolutes:

"And as Ketchel stood in the ring with his fist raised high," Blake writes, "he knew that what he most loved about fighting was its clarity. He could not have expressed it, but he understood as surely as he'd ever understood anything that when you knock a man out you resolve matters with an absoluteness impossible to rhetorical arguments or philosophical disputes. A knockout was pure truth."

Pursuing this truth reveals a character at times admirable and at other times frightening.

A champion in the ring, Ketchel's celebrity propels him to pursue pleasures in increasingly more sordid venues, and the consequences shade his character in ominous ways, ultimately leading to his tragic end.

I have to admit that when I started this novel, I was uncertain about how much pleasure a book about a boxer would afford me. As Pete the Goat, one of Ketchel's trainers, says: "Boxing's a rough game. Kinda funny sometimes, kinda strange sometimes, kinda sad sometimes. But all the time rough. Like the man said, it ain't for everybody."

Despite Pete's warning, this book would be hard for anyone to put down. Its playful sensuousness and stoic determination are impossible to resist. Reading this novel may be kinda rough, but ultimately, it's an absolute knockout.

Geoffrey Bateman teaches literature and writing at the University of Colorado.