One thing I always have admired about Damon Runyon is that, like so many great writers, he taught himself to write. No writing courses or creative-writing degrees. In fact, he barely went to school.

This year is the 75th anniversary of his biggest success, the story collection "Guys and Dolls."

		"GUYS AND DOLLS" By Damon Runyon Penguin ($14.95)

His best-known technique was use of the historic present, or the eternal present, as a narrative voice; he resolutely avoided the past tense. The English critic E.C. Bentley said, "There is a sort of ungrammatical purity about it, an almost religious exactitude."

The following typical opening to a Runyon story (from "Situation Wanted") gives an idea both of the use of the historic present and of how the nameless narrator -- a man who says of himself, "I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around"-- gets involved in dicey situations:

"One evening in the summer of 1936 I am passing in front of Mindy's restaurant on Broadway when the night manager suddenly opens the door and throws a character in a brown suit at me."

It is a style as distinctive as Raymond Chandler's; even more distinctive, for you can imitate Chandler with some success, but if you try to imitate Runyon's you will only end up sounding foolish.

Chandler's outlook was expressed through his private-eye hero, Philip Marlowe, who roamed the sunny streets of Los Angeles.

Runyon created a nameless narrator on a romanticized Broadway filled with romanticized bad guys and tough dolls. It is Broadway between Times Square and Columbus Circle, the Hardened Artery as it was called by Runyon's friend Walter Winchell (the model for newspaper writer Waldo Winchester in the stories).

This edition of "Guys and Dolls" contains more and newer stories than were in the first 1932 edition.

The plots are admittedly hokey and sentimental, with an ironic O. Henry twist at the end. Little wonder that Hollywood not only snapped them up one after the other -- at least 16 times -- but filmed the same stories again and again.

The Broadway musical "Guys and Dolls," is based loosely on two stories, "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure."

The 1951 movie "The Lemon Drop Kid," based on a story of the same title, produced the lovely Christmas song "Silver Bells."

As stories, what keeps them from being hackneyed are the brilliant use of a manufactured argot and the silent contract between writer and reader that no one is taking this too seriously.

If we did, we would not be able to get beyond the fact that a lot of violence is being committed by some not very nice people.

Runyon told his reporter friend, Gene Fowler, that he didn't care about plots. No one, he said, remembers the plots of Dickens or Twain; they only remember the characters.

And characters he has aplenty, so much so that the term "Runyonesque character" is part of the language:

Hot Horse Herbie, Dream Street Rose, Little Isadore and Madame La Gimp.

And, of course, Nicely-Nicely Jones. "What he does for a livelihood is the best he can, which is an occupation that is greatly overcrowded at all times along Broadway."

Yet for all his stories' geniality and sentimentality, their view of the world is essentially a bleak and fatalistic one in which human relationships are primarily a series of con jobs. Nor should we expect anything else from a writer who said, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet."