DEAD-END JOBS THE AX By Donald E. Westlake Mysterious Press 273pp $23.00 While inflation stays low and the market stays high, it's easy to forget those who fell in the last great bloodbath. But many of the walking dead, victims of corporate downsizing, are with us yet. Consider Burke Devore, the antihero of Donald Westlake's latest crime novel. You know the type: fiftyish, a former middle manager with 20 years' experience in an old-line industry (in Devore's case, paper manufacturing) that's struggling to change with the times. But Burke, two years idle and with two teenagers to support, decides to do something about his predicament. He rents out a post office box, places a phony ad for just the sort of position he'd like, and waits for the resumes to pour in from other local downsizees. Then he sets about eliminating the competition in the most direct way imaginable: with an unregistered Luger. What a self-starter. Any company would be lucky to hire someone with Burke's initiative. Westlake doesn't make his murderous protagonist likable--he can't--but he does make him human. Burke sees himself as an average guy among a sea of displaced average guys, only a little smarter and less passive: ''I'm not a murderer, I never was.... What I'm doing now I was forced into, by the logic of events; the shareholders' logic, and the executives' logic, and the logic of the marketplace, and the logic of the workforce, and the logic of the millennium, and finally by my own logic.'' So it's off to the victims' habitats, where much of The Ax takes place, with Burke slowly stalking his prey and honing his killer instinct. Typical of the genre, the blow-by-blow is graphic and dispassionate, and its details can be a bit much: ''He comes out through the swing door, goes to get a cup and saucer and spoon and the glass coffee pot, brings them all over to me, pours me a cup of coffee....'' Westlake, gleefully amoral in such works as the tabloid-journalism satire Trust Me On This, is less ebullient this time out. His comic perversity is intact: Listen to Burke do a bland postmortem on his latest rubout (''Well, that wasn't so bad'') or rationalize his secrecy (''In any event, why burden Marjorie with these problems? There's nothing she can do beyond what she's doing''). Yet as he dispatches his rivals one by one, Burke becomes almost mournful, philosophizing about an America that no longer protects her middle class. Here, The Ax takes on a poignancy unexpected of a page-turner in the crowded bullets-and-bodies field. One man's downsizing may not seem a national tragedy, but Westlake pinpoints the subtle, sad consequences of job elimination that tear at the social fabric. In his single-minded pursuit of the ideal situation, Burke neglects his doting wife, who begins an affair. (Among other things, The Ax is a clear-eyed study of a disintegrating marriage.) As the family is forced to do without the material comforts that it has come to expect, the son takes to larceny. This is how it happens, the book seems to say: The lack of workplace security in the '90s makes us all more afraid, pettier, and poorer. BY MARC MILLER RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``The Ax''

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