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eBook Category: Mystery/Crime LIM Readers' Choice Award Winner
eBook Description: In the shadowy metropolis that is 1938 Chicago, Steve Malek is a Tribune police reporter in a city gripped by the Kelly-Nash political machine and the post-Capone crime syndicate. In Malek's depression-era world, the Tribune is the largest of the town's fiercely competative daily papers. With the winds of change blowing in, Malek senses the story of a lifetime when a reform candidate for mayor is gunned down by an unknown assailant.

eBook Publisher: Echelon Press, Published: 2005
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2005

This eBook is part of the following series:

• Robert Goldsborough's Snap Malek Mystery Series

2 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [286 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [279 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [252 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [1.3 MB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [286 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [229 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [298 KB] , hiebook (KML) [639 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [324 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [237 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [294 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [327 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [368 KB]
Words: 84349
Reading time: 240-337 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: 1590804252

"Robert Goldsborough, the man who so brilliantly brought Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin back to literary life, has returned with a new detective, all his own--and that's cause for any mystery fan to rejoice! Goldsborough is a master storyteller, providing crackling dialogue and plot twists around every corner--readers are in for a real treat!"--Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Purgatory

I awoke at 10:30 on New Year's morning with a headache, which surprised me. True, I had rung in 1938 at Kilkenny's just down the street, but I nursed only three beers in that entire stretch, from about 9:00 p.m. until past 1:30. Plus I took seconds and thirds from the big spread that the Killer had laid out, in his own words, "as a way of thanking all my regular customers, who are also my dear and cherished friends, for their enduring patronage and their tolerance of my myriad foibles." That's how the Killer talks.

"Oh, noblest of Gaelic publicans," I had responded in kind, lifting high my glass, "we do indeed tolerate your varied foibles, bizarre though they may be, for we-and I speak for all in this august assemblage-have at one time or another found solace in your understanding and sympathetic ear and your hospitable nature, a nature that befits one whose roots go deep into the Old Sod."

"Malek, sit down and shut up, or better yet, have yourself another drink," Morty Easterly bellowed. "One gasbag in this joint is enough, and as he happens to own the place, we can't very well tell him to button his yap."

"Point taken, albeit reluctantly," I said amid a chorus of jeers, waving and sitting down. I kept on eating and socializing as the old year slipped away, but I declined the champagne poured with a flourish nearing midnight, and I was home and asleep by 2:00. The moral, if one is to be found: Next time, two aspirin before bed. I rolled over and turned on the squawky little radio on the nightstand to get a weather report, but all I could find was music-Crosby and Kate Smith and Rudy Vallee-plus one station where a bass voice somberly recited the major events of 1937: FDR's second inauguration ... the crash of the Hindenburg dirigible at Lakehurst ... Japan's invasion of China ... the continuing Spanish Civil War ... Amelia Earhart's plane lost in the Pacific ... Joe Louis knocking out Braddock at Comiskey Park for the heavyweight title.

"Tell me something I don't know, like the temperature, will ya?" I muttered, turning off the radio and easing out of bed, making sure my feet landed on the small island of rug where I'd parked my slippers. I padded across the wood floor to the window. The sun had punched through the clouds, and the predicted flurries never showed up.

Most of Chicago was still asleep, or at least inside likely nursing its collective hangover. Three stories below me, Clark Street was empty save for a red streetcar that lumbered by, clanging its bell at nothing in particular. A few weeks earlier, after we had spent a Saturday night in Kilkenny's, Walt Carlin from the copy desk at the Tribune decided he didn't want to go all the way south to his two-room flat on 67th Street, so he bunked on my sofa. He got up in the morning griping about how noisy my place is, what with all the traffic on Clark, particularly the bell-happy streetcars. But in the two years I'd lived there, the racket had never bothered me. Maybe it's because I'm a heavy sleeper, or maybe it goes back to the three-flat in Pilsen where I grew up. It had railroad tracks right behind it that rattled the china in my mother's kitchen cupboard at least once every half hour, day and night, or so it seemed to me. As my father liked to say, "If you can fall asleep here, you can doze off at State and Madison the Saturday after Thanksgiving with a Salvation Army band playing five feet away."

I measured coffee into the pot and shuffled to the front door. The Trib was in the hall on the mat, neatly folded rather than thrown down with its inside sections spilling out, as was usually the case. The talk I had with the newsboy when I gave him his year-end tip seemed to be paying off, at least for now. Sitting with a Lucky Strike and a cup of black coffee at my small kitchen table, I went through the paper. The banner story, as it is every January 1, told how the New Year's Eve crowd jammed the Loop, and what a wonderful time they had. I figure the type for this piece just gets saved and reused year after year.

A few pages back was the headline HITLER MAKES A NEW YEAR VOW-GREATER ARMS, under which the guy calling himself Fuehrer was quoted as saying "Expansion of German fighting forces is a political necessity." As I worked through the front section, I grinned for the first time in 1938. My day-old piece about a raid on a South Wabash handbook ran almost as I had written it, including the lead: "Bookie Carl 'Ace' McCabe had a deuce of a time Friday when a trio of Chicago Police in four minutes wrote him up on five separate charges of illegal gambling." I never thought it would clear the copy desk, although that cretin of a slot man on the day side, Jasper Cams, made sure there was no byline on the story.

The lead editorial warned that "There will be no comfortable coasting in 1938" and that "Times call above all for fortitude."

"Just what I needed to hear," I muttered into my cup. "A stiff-upper-lip lecture to break in a new calendar." I silently mouthed the name of the Trib's chief editorial writer and followed it with several of the words the paper refuses to print.

Turning the page, I groaned at the three-column photo printed there-the city's number one publicity hound and self-proclaimed do-gooder had struck again. The man who reporters privately refer to as "Goody Two-Shoes" had held another of his "Let's Do Battle Together for a Clean Chicago" rallies, this one on the sidewalk in front of City Hall on New Year's Eve afternoon. The extended caption (there was no story) read: "Some 100 or more interested citizens and casual passers-by listened attentively as reformer and heir to a steel fortune Lloyd Martindale exhorted them to 'get rid of those despicable vermin known by the all-too-polite label of organized crime.' Martindale, who many speculate is setting his sights on running for mayor in 1939, urged his listeners to demand 'better police protection, better government leaders, and a better year ahead for all residents of our great city.'"

He closed by lambasting Mayor Edward J. Kelly as "a tool of the Nittis, the Riccas, and all of those other repugnant throwbacks to the Capone era who think it is their birthright to ply their nefarious businesses: gambling, white slavery, and drug dealing."

It sounded familiar, and for good reason. On a blustery fall afternoon some three months earlier, Martindale had pulled the same stunt in front of Police Headquarters at 11th and State, and all of us in the pressroom begrudgingly-and under orders from our city editors-trudged outside to cover his harangues.