Enlarge Pound for Pound By F.X. Toole Ecco, 366 pp., $25.95

Nor did he get to finish his only novel. When Toole died during emergency heart surgery at the age of 72 in 2002, he left 900 pages of a boxing saga.

According to his children, his last words were, "Doc, get me a little more time, I gotta finish my book."

It sounds like a line from his novel, Pound for Pound, which has been "shaped," as its publisher puts it, by Toole's agent, Nat Sobel, and editor James Wade.

The result isn't a literary knockout, but the novel, pared down to 366 pages, goes the distance. It offers a bracing education in the sport and business of boxing.

Sport, some may ask? "It's a terrible sport, but it's a sport," Rocky Graziano, the former middleweight champ, once said.

Pound for Pound is more sprawling and ultimately less tragic than Million Dollar Baby but shares many of the same themes and attention to sweet and sweaty details.

The novel is tough and softhearted. It's big on misery, bravado and redemption. It deals with the corruption and duplicity of boxing promoters and handlers (no surprise there), but is saved by memorable characters, gritty authenticity and spare, energetic writing.

In a foreword, James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) writes that "boxing tempts writers."

From Joyce Carol Oates to Norman Mailer, they've found material in this most brutal of sports. Most come to boxing as outsiders, Ellroy notes.

"Writers want to visit, but not live there. They come for the pathos and drama, then move on."

Not Toole, whose real name was Jerry Boyd. For 22 years, he worked as a trainer and cut man whose job, which he vividly describes in his novel, is to use thrombin and adrenaline to stem the flow of blood between rounds so a fighter can keep fighting.

"Stopping blood is a precise skill, one that makes a cut man feel like a champ," he writes.

As for pain, that "usually came after the fight was over, the delay of pain part of what made fighting possible. Pain had good manners, normally waited until after the dance before it came to collect."

Set mostly on the seedy side of Los Angeles, the novel revolves around two sets of grandfathers and grandsons, one Irish, one Tex-Mex. The transition from one story to the other is abrupt, but ultimately they're linked by a common and haunted history.

The most vivid character is Dan Cooley, an aging, self-destructive trainer and an even darker version of Eastwood's character in the movie.

Cooley has had enough family heartbreak to fill a morgue but finds redemption in a mangy dog and the dreams of a young fighter who's smart enough to know what he doesn't know about boxing.

If that sounds sentimental, it is, in a hard-boiled, stem-the-blood kind of way.