The very nature of sports, and its language, have made it a natural background subject for crime stories. Baseball fans yell “Kill the umpire,” football has sudden death, hockey has penalty killers, certain plays kill rallies, long fly balls die before they reach the seats, tennis players have killer serves, and so on.

It has long been stated that, when it came down to writing about sports, the smaller the ball, the better the writing. Books and articles about golf and baseball are held up as examples of how artful and stylistic journalism and fiction could be, while the number of memorable works about basketball, soccer, and football falls far short.

Carried to an extreme, this would suggest that there should be Pulitzer Prizes awaiting books about pingpong and marbles, but let’s not get too literal. And this evaluation naturally omits hockey, which isn’t so much a sport as an excuse for thuggery, and boxing, which may have inspired the finest writing of all.

A few years ago, F.X. Toole wrote a long story for “Murder on the Ropes,” an anthology of crime stories with a boxing background that I edited (it also contained a heart wrenching story by Joyce Carol Oates, a huge fan of the sport). Around the same time, his first book, “Rope Burns” (Ecco) was published.

This collection of novellas and stories mostly featured crimes of one sort or another – not surprising, given the nature of boxing and the people who are drawn to it. There are the out-and-out thugs like Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson; the notorious thieves, like virtually all promoters in the history of the sport; and the champ, Don King, a convicted murderer who was such a help to Tyson’s career that the boxer, who earned nearly half a billion dollars, had to declare bankruptcy.

A couple of the stories in “Rope Burns” were combined and filmed as “Million Dollar Baby.” Unhappily, Toole died before the movie was released, but he left behind a novel – “Pound for Pound” – that will be published next year. It should be celebrated by everyone who likes serious literature, whether they are boxing fans or not.

The same may be said of “The Killings of Stanley Ketchel” (William Morrow, 311 pages, $25.95), the new novel by James Carlos Blake.

Shortly after the turn of the century, Ketchel won the middleweight championship and became the most famous non-heavyweight prizefighter in America. His fame was exceeded only by the retired John L. Sullivan and Jim Jeffries, his skill only by the reigning heavyweight champion, the notorious Jack Johnson.

Ketchel may not have been a true criminal, but he was pretty close, and he was certainly an outlaw (as have just about all the protagonists of Mr. Blake’s books). After a violent encounter with his father, he left him for dead, running away from home to live the life of a hobo, ride the rails, seek adventure, and live on the shady side of the law. He had extraordinary strength for a modest sized man, and his speedy reflexes and fearless and violent nature led him to a career first as a bouncer and then as a boxer who knocked out opponents with careless ease.

As he learned to improve on his natural talents, he was soon recognized as probably the greatest fighter in the world. It was inevitable that his ambition and cockiness would lead Ketchel to a fight against Johnson, who towered over him and outweighed him by 50 pounds.

The two fighters and their managers agreed to fix the result: The fight would go the distance, which would result in a draw, as in those early days of the sport only a knockout could result in victory. But once they got in the ring (why is it called a ring, incidentally, when it’s actually square?), Ketchel reneged on the agreement immediately, smashing Johnson as hard as he could.

The crowd went wild, as virtually all of them were rooting against the arrogant Negro who antagonized white America by dating white women and not accepting his place as an inferior. The fight ended when Johnson hit Ketchel so hard that he later found two of the middleweight’s teeth embedded in his glove.

There’s a lot of boxing in this novel, and it will enhance your pleasure if you like the sport, though it’s not necessary. This book is an expansive view of America before World War I, in its toughest towns, in the great cities, and in the Eden-like, if poor, rural districts of the Midwest.

“The Killings of Stanley Ketchel” offers wisdom, too. When the teenage boy ran away from home, he sometimes thought about his mother and the place he had left behind. “He had yet to learn,” Mr. Blake writes, “that the worst kind of homesickness a man might feel can be for a place he’s never been or even heard of, a place he may never know.”

And there is humor. At his first professional bout, Ketchel has as a cornerman a former boxer whose head involuntarily twitched every few seconds. When Ketchel asked him how many fights he’d had, the answer was, “Oh, about 50, I guess.” “How’d you do?” he asked. “Not too bad,” he said. “Won all of them but about 40.”

Ketchel killed some people, and eventually died a violent death when he was still a young man. This wonderfully written adventure is part biography, part American picaresque novel, part crime story – episodic but compelling, humorous, exciting, and ultimately tragic. Mr. Blake has again produced a knockout of a book.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at openzler@nysun.com.