Scott D. Parker
As we conclude Thanksgiving 2024 with thoughts of all the things we are thankful for, I would like to remind you of the 7th Annual Evie's Holiday Book Drive. This foundation was created after one of our own, Duane Swierczynski, lost his daughter to cancer back in 2018.
Read Evie's story, learn why she was considered like super glue, and help the foundation reach this year's target.
If you were alive and read newspapers anytime between 1960 and 2011, then you probably read, and should have read, Jimmy Breslin. Newspaperman, novelist, quintessential New York City character, Queens guy born and bred -- Jimmy Breslin. From sometime in the 1970s on, I as a New York area person read Breslin, and I remember too, as far back as the early 1970s, my father enjoying and praising his writing, specifically his 1969 book The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. This is Breslin's Mafia novel, based on the life (up to that point) of "Crazy" Joe Gallo. For those not up on Mafia history, Gallo is the guy who was a caporegime in the Colombo crime family in New York City. He's the man behind the shooting of Colombo family boss Joseph Colombo on June 28, 1971 during an Italian-American Civil Rights League rally in Columbus Circle in New York City. How things came to this head is byzantine, but suffice it to say that Gallo paid for this transgression when he was gunned down in April of 1972 at Umberto's Clam House, an Italian restaurant in New York's Little Italy. There are depictions of these events, at least a version of these events, in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. Anyway, Breslin used these people and their associates as raw material for his novel, a portrayal of criminals and their various enterprises that is most comical. I remember my father, who loved this kind of fiction, reading sections out loud to me when I was a kid and laughing.
Breslin was funny. He had that gift. But he was also dead serious about and utterly committed to writing and his journalistic profession, and the new biography about him, Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth, captures that. Indeed, it captures the many aspects of a very complicated person, a man who was at once brilliant, difficult, obsessive, profane, driven, egotistic, devoted to his family, and dedicated above all else to telling the truth, the consequences of that telling of the truth be damned.
Richard Esposito is the author, a man who knew Breslin well and worked with him. He tells the story of Breslin's life from his birth to his death and explains why regardless of how famous Breslin became, no matter the stature of the people he wound up hobnobbing with during his long life, he never shifted or softened in his loyalty to basic working class people. These were Breslin's people, the ones who get up every day rain or shine, despite all the difficulties and often injustices facing them, and go to work to support themselves and their families.
As far as Breslin's career, it was no doubt remarkable. And all the deserved highlights are described here: Breslin covering John F. Kennedy's death and burial in a way nobody else did; Breslin running for New York City Council president alongside mayoral candidate Norman Mailer in 1968; Breslin in 1977 corresponding through the New York Daily News with the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, after the killer wrote a letter addressed to him at that paper; Breslin writing about the 1978 Lufthansa heist; Breslin winning a Pulitzer Prize; Breslin getting attacked during the Crown Heights riots in 1991 and being left after the beating with only his underwear and his press card; Breslin in his eighties mingling with the angry 99 per cent at the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations in 2011. Esposito talks about how Breslin was a key writer in the style of what became known as the New Journalism (Tom Wolfe worked with Breslin for a time), and he doesn't neglect getting into Breslin as both husband and father, his strengths as both and how exasperating he could be. Best of all, the author does not stint on presenting passages of Breslin's writing through the years, and though those who knew Breslin may at times have felt they couldn't take any more of him (until the next time they'd see him), there's no getting weary of Breslin's prose. Could that man write! After reading this book, I'm thinking now of buying a collection of his pieces, just to revisit them from time to time.
As I've been implying, Esposito doesn't shy away from pointing out that Breslin with his moods and volatility could be trying to deal with for others. He doesn't whitewash Breslin. However, he does repeatedly sing the writer's praises, stating over and over in different ways how good a writer Breslin was, and if I have any quibbles with the book, it's this: the excellence of Breslin's writing is apparent, and the praise from Esposito becomes a bit much at times, a little repetitive. Otherwise, this is an excellent biography about a writer from a journalistic tradition that seems to be going, going, gone, and I quite enjoyed it.
PS: It may help to be a New Yorker and to have read Breslin when he was reporting to enjoy this book, but it definitely is not necessary.
A more logical reader might read each book in a long-running series in order, but Turkey Trot Murder (2017) was the only audiobook available at the library. It is Meier’s 24th (out of 30 by next year). As a result, I had a bit of whiplash when I landed back in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, and our heroine, Lucy Stone.
She’s now a full-time report for the local weekly, but she and her husband, Bill, are now empty nesters. When I last left them in 1996’s Trick or Treat Murder, all the kids were, well, kids living at home. Lucy had to juggle all her various duties—mom, wife, reporter, friend—while still trying to solve that Halloween mystery.
Here, however, it’s just her and Bill, and she’s the catalyst for the entire story. It was Lucy, out running and training for the annual Turkey Trot race, who stumbled on the body of a young woman, face down in an icy pond.
I know that allowing characters to age in real time is nothing new, but I’ve actually read few long-running series so I found it rather refreshing. The youngest child is eighteen and in college while the oldest has already made grandparents out of Lucy and Bill.
In the less-than-a-dozen cozy mysteries I’ve read to date, there is a common factor: despite the technology, many of these stories take place in a time you really can’t nail down (unless you read the copyright page and know what year it was published). Still, so many of these stories are timeless, in that they could land in almost any year of the last thirty or so years.
But Turkey Trot Murder lets in some things that were actually going on before 2017 and to this day. One of the characters is an American-born restaurateur whose heritage is from Spain. He appears Hispanic and nothing he says dissuades a certain subset of the population.
That subset are exemplified by a desire to make sure this restaurateur does not open his restaurant in Tinker’s Cove. “America for Americans” is the slogan these people chant over and over again, and it’s enough to make you cringe. It made Lucy and many of the the other characters cringe as well, and I appreciated the counter-arguments made to oppose this slogan. It was here the First Thanksgiving was referenced more than once, but it fell on deaf ears.
Like I mentioned last month, Meier’s books are almost general fiction in that we spend a lot of time just in the everyday lives of Lucy and the other residents of Tinker’s Cove. It’s charming, to be honest, and it really makes you want to visit or, perhaps, look at your own town and see something similar.
There are crimes to be solved and Lucy, with her press badge, easily puts herself in the middle of everything. And, just like a good protagonist, she starts the story with the discovery and she ends it as well. Quite satisfactorily, I might add.
The mysteries of Lucy Stone by Leslie Meier have rapidly become comfort reading. I love visiting Tinker’s Cove, and I encourage you to plan a trip there. There are nearly 30 different novels, most surrounding a holiday. Pick one and dive in.
