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Tag Archives: FBI

Cuba Libre: Night Work

09 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1959, Cuba, David C. Taylor, FBI, Fidel Castro, Fulgencia Batista, Havana, historical fiction, J. Edgar Hoover, mystery, New York, social snobbery, thriller, twentieth century, Upper East Side

Review: Night Work, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2016. 318 pp. $26

Michael Cassidy is a New York City detective who does things his way, which really pisses off a lot of people–like the Mob, the FBI, revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, Upper East Side bluebloods, and, oh, yes, his Department superiors. But what the hell, right? He’s very good at solving murders, and in 1959, that means there’s plenty of work to do. More important, it’s rumored he “has juice” or a “rabbi,” which is to say, friends in high places, not least his mobster godfather. (No, not that kind of godfather. A real one.)

Constantino Arias's photo, titled, "The Ugly American," of a tourist in Batista's Havana, 1950s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Constantino Arias’s photo, titled, “The Ugly American,” of a tourist in Batista’s Havana, 1950s (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

Nevertheless, Michael’s wiseass sense of humor pushes the wrong buttons. For instance, when the deputy chief of police demands to know whether the detective harbors “lefty” sympathies, as in, who he voted for in 1956, Michael replies, “Mickey Mantle. He had a good season. Batted three-oh-four, had thirty-nine home runs. I figured it was time for him to move up.” Naturally, that witticism doesn’t sit well.

But what’s bad (or shall we say, “inadvisable”?) for Michael is great fun for the reader. The reason Deputy Chief Clarkson wants to know his politics is because Fidel Castro, having just chased Fulgencia Batista out of Cuba, is paying an ambassadorial visit to New York. As it happens, Michael has been to Havana on police business, where, by the way, he sprang his former lover, Dylan McCue, from prison the day before her scheduled execution. Since many disaffected Cubans and their unsavory American allies (like Meyer Lansky, the mobster) would be happy to assassinate Castro, security will be tight. But will it be tight enough? And is there a Cuban connection to a murder Michael’s investigating on the Upper East Side?

Night Work is the sequel to Night Life and offers many of the same pleasures, though on a broader stage. Taylor writes about power as corrupting, and the Cuban revolution offers plenty of grist. You see it in the graft and brutalities of the Batista regime, which runs the country like a plantation, and in the revolutionaries who execute hundreds in the name of democracy, believing in slogans rather than decency. Compare these two descriptions, first, before the changing of the guard:

Havana was an occupied city, occupied by American tourists dressed in colors never found in nature. The cafés and bars were filled with afternoon drinkers having loud fun. It was an expanded version of the party on the flight over. Here none of the normal rules applied, and when you went home, anything that might smudge your conscience was forgotten, wiped clean by the ninety-mile flight across the water.

And after:

‘I was there,’ the man said and showed him his bandaged forearm proudly. He wore a madras shirt, khaki pants, and sandals, and he had a Thompson submachine gun barrel down on a strap over his shoulder. He wore the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, the new fashion in Havana. . . . .He laughed and offered Cassidy a cigar and insisted he drink from the bottle of rum he pulled from his back pocket, and when the next group of trucks entered the square, he righted his gun and fired a burst into the air.

But New York is still the novel’s core. The author depicts both the seedy corners where bagmen do their dirty work, hoping the big man will reward them, and the fifteenth-story apartments on the Upper East Side with river views, where bigoted, self-important snobs assume that messy problems are for lesser folk. I also enjoy how Taylor portrays Mephistopheles himself, J. Edgar Hoover, making a return cameo from Night Life. The New York idiom too, is always a treat, as with, “There’s a place over on Lex makes great coffee,” or “what I tell all of them come ask about my customers.” That’s writing with an observant ear.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll lodge the same complaints against this novel as I did its ancestor. Michael’s a male pheromone factory, and no female seems immune. He doesn’t even have to try, though in this book, one beauty actually ditches him for Paul Newman, if that says anything. Michael does have advanced chemistry going with Dylan, a KGB agent, and I believe that relationship, though I’m less sure about the way she keeps showing up at unexpected moments. It serves the story, which is extremely well plotted, the murder mystery in particular, but, as with some of the derring-do, I have my doubts.

That said, Night Work is enormously entertaining. Even better, the characters all believe in something, which gives depth to what, in other hands, might be merely a colorful, suspenseful novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Judicial Murder: The Hours Count

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1950s, espionage, Ethel Rosenberg, FBI, historical fiction, hysteria, Jillian Cantor, Julius Rosenberg, McCarthyism, twentieth century

Review: The Hours Count, by Jillian Cantor
Riverhead, 2015. 356 pp. $27

In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to the electric chair, accused of conspiracy to commit espionage, the only American civilians ever to pay with their lives for that crime. The FBI charged Julius with having passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, and Ethel, with having typed up the papers. The case rested on a confession by Ethel’s brother, an apparent plea bargain for which he served ten years in prison. Decades later, he admitted that the prosecution had encouraged him to implicate Ethel in order to save his wife, and that he had lied to do so.

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg immediately after their conviction, 1951 (Roger Higgins, New York World-Telegram and the Sun, public domain by gift to the Library of Congress)

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg immediately after their conviction, 1951 (Roger Higgins, New York World-Telegram and the Sun, public domain by gift to the Library of Congress).

The Hours Count is a deeply disturbing novel that compels the reader to care about these doomed people, victims of a national hysteria that Cantor captures to a T. Moreover, she does so by threading politics lightly through her narrative until the last few chapters, underlining how the hysteria snowballed, catching the Rosenbergs (and just about everyone else) by surprise. Cantor conveys all this by focusing on the Rosenbergs’ loving marriage, dedication to their children, and ordinary kindness and generosity. In the milieu she creates, it defies imagination that Ethel could have been a spy, known that her husband was, or that they should have been electrocuted when all the other convicted defendants went to jail.

Cantor tells her story through Millie Stein, a down-the-hall neighbor of the Rosenbergs who sees her friend Ethel as a person much like herself, beset with day-to-day problems of caring for children, managing on an ever-tighter budget, and ignoring vicious insults from godawful relatives. For instance, if a child misbehaves or, as in Millie’s son’s case, hasn’t learned to talk by age three, it’s obviously the mother’s fault. Her mother and mother-in-law, among others, point the phrase why can’t you be like ____? at Millie like a weapon, and she feels isolated and friendless. What a superb metaphor: Even before the FBI comes knocking, there’s already an inquisition going on, and her family are the hooded judges, from whose indictment there’s no appeal. It’s as if the government or American society were a family, and the real enemy within are the opportunistic vigilantes, whether they’re J. Edgar Hoover or your grudge-holding siblings.

Millie’s dilemma, once she can no longer ignore the illogical, even nonsensical, events that take place around her–including her brutish, Russian husband’s peculiar work habits–is what to do and whom to trust. She wants to do the right thing, but it’s hard to tell what that is. As a naive, unsophisticated narrator, she can’t help believing that she’s to blame for her child’s tantrums and inability to talk, and in her yearning to help him, Millie makes some bad choices. For one, the reader knows long before she does that the psychotherapist who purports to treat her boy has another, very different agenda in mind, which includes seducing her.

That’s a literary pet peeve of mine, therapists who sleep with their patients. Yes, I know it happens in real life, and Millie craves the kindness her husband refuses to give her, so she’s a ready target. But the pervasive stereotype of the predatory, manipulative doctor of the mind is yet another form of hysteria, and though it serves Cantor’s plot, there are problems with it here.

One is Millie’s credulousness, which seems extreme. It takes her forever and a day to figure out the real sources of trouble, and once she does, she keeps trusting the wrong people. I wanted her to have more backbone, or at least a better head on her shoulders.

I also question the author’s decision to split up the chapter describing the executions and dole it out in pieces. We already know the Rosenbergs will die; in fact, the first line of the book jacket says so. Historical fiction about well-known events rests on the telling, at which Cantor does beautifully. Why, then, in the first chapter, does Millie attempt to get into Sing Sing the fatal night (which, the author admits, is highly improbable) and influence the proceedings? The vague portents mentioned in this chapter achieve nothing, in my view.

Just tell the story and have the confidence that the reader will follow. The Hours Count is one that demands to be read.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Defenestration and Other Sports: Night Life

06 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

1954, Broadway, CIA, David C. Taylor, FBI, historical fiction, J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, Mafia, Manhattan, murder, New York Police Department, Roy Cohn, thriller

Review: Night Life, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2015. 332 pp. $26

I have to like Michael Cassidy, a New York detective who throws a cop out a third-story window–the guy needed it–and who, in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts, tells Roy Cohn to stick it. For those of you whose grandmothers didn’t wish Roy Cohn a lingering death from throat cancer, as mine did, and have therefore never heard of him, he was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s legal counsel. So within the first ten pages of Night Life, I was already enrolled in the Michael Cassidy fan club and having a good time.

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, opposing counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, Army counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

Cassidy defies expectations in several ways. First, he’s not of Irish ancestry, no matter what the name suggests, and how his father got that name figures in the story. Second, Michael comes from a comfortable, middle-class background (his father’s a successful Broadway producer) and appreciates jazz and modern art. Third, though he’s uptown by birth, there isn’t a pickpocket, madam, or hood he doesn’t know in Hell’s Kitchen or the meat-packing district, and he has a tolerant, persuasive way with them that nets him bits of information.

And that’s what Cassidy needs, because a Broadway dancer has been found tortured to death. Normally, nobody would care. But for some reason, the FBI (“the Feebles”), the CIA, and the Mafia are all interested, and they have ways of declaring their curiosity or punishing those who talk out of turn. Meanwhile, a tough, beautiful woman moves into the apartment downstairs from Michael’s, just the cure for his lonely, broken heart, a person with whom he can share his bed and his troubles.

I like how Taylor portrays his characters, including Michael’s father and siblings–the family scenes are terrific–the theater folk, the political figures (McCarthy, Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover), Michael’s building superintendent, the police. They seem alive to me, and they make the novel hum, even more than the constant reversals or conflicting evidence that Michael must sift through. Best of all, to this transplanted New Yorker, the city feels alive too, in its speech, sights, and smells. I’m so tired of reading about New York from authors who don’t know the place. Taylor does:


A bearded man in a white robe stood on a milk crate at the corner of 49th and tried to interest the hurrying people in the fast-approaching end of the world. The clatter and bong of pinball machines and the whoops of players at the shooting games rattled out the open door of the arcade on 47th. Just past it was a discount store that had been GOING OUT OF BUSINE$$$$ for six years. It sold cheap portable radios, Japanese cameras, World War II surplus equipment, and knives that couldn’t hold an edge at ROCK BOTTOM PRICE$$$$$.


Night Life does suffer from stereotypes, though. Nearly every woman in this book, Cassidy’s sister included, is gorgeous, and she’s just about the only one who doesn’t want to take his clothes off. Michael performs many feats of derring-do, some of which are less than believable, particularly toward the end. Yeah, this stuff belongs to the genre; but still.

Most dubiously, he has dreams that predict danger–correctly, as it turns out. Taylor handles the clairvoyance well enough so that you don’t hear wind chimes or spooky music, yet for a cop who has his feet firmly planted in the grit, it doesn’t quite add up. The ending, too, stretches credulity in a couple ways, not least a loose end–a dangerous loose end–left untied.

Even so, Night Life is just too lively to dismiss. When Michael catches one of the Feebles rifling his desk and tells him to buzz off, the Feeble asks, “Got something to hide, Detective?” To which our man replies, “Pictures of your sister from when I worked Vice.”

Got to love it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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