“Before the small war broke them
apart,” Dennis Lehane’s World Gone By
begins, “they all gathered to support the big war.”
From there, I sensed I was in good
hands with this fluid, serpentine, and eloquent historical crime novel, the
best work of fiction I’ve read so far in 2015.
Lehane is the author of, among many novels, Gone Baby Gone, and was also one of the
writers for The Wire. This book is the
last in a trilogy focusing on the life and times of Joe Coughlin that began
with The Given Day and Live By Night. I’ve not the read those
first two—in fact, this is the first Lehane novel I’ve read--but I never once felt
at sea with World Gone By. If this is
your first Lehane, you’re in for a treat.
The novel opens in 1942. World War
II has just begun. Joe Coughlin has evolved from Boston street gangster to consiglieri
to the Bartolo gang, the number-one crime family in Tampa, Florida. Joe is a semi-respectable
racketeer now, at ease slipping up and down between the world above and the world
below.
A soft retirement lies ahead. Joe
is respected in both worlds as a man with virtually no enemies, one who makes (mostly
illegal) money for his friends while ably protecting them from the law. He
seems like a man who, after a long life of crime and corruption, may at last be
taking the last turnoff to straight town.
Why kill this golden goose? we
wonder. As Joe learns quickly, no one in the underworld can ever said to be
safe. A rumor reaches him, via one of the more curious kinks in the lowlife grapevine,
that his death is wanted. And will happen. He’s even given a calendar date for
his appointment with murder: Ash Wednesday, two short weeks away.
Joe sets out to find out who wants
him dead and why on a colorful winding path that unfolds with pleasing roundabout
grace and slow-fused suspense. Along the way, we meet a colorful crew of
underworld figures including his boss, Dino Bartolo; his glamourous best friend
Rico DiGiacomo; Mantooth Dix, top-hatted godfather of Tampa’s black underworld;
and King Lucius, as poisonous and reclusive as a black widow, perverse beyond
even the understanding of bad men.
The various justifications Joe and
his friends have used over three decades to justify “our thing” (La Cosa Nostra) are wearing thin these
days, in the light of Joe’s parental responsibilities, a reminder that most gangsters
are human. With clumsy sincerity, Joe’s trying to raise his only son, Tomas, on
his own after the murder of his mother some years earlier. He wants to raise a
good kid, but that’s a mite challenging when Pop’s earning most of his money
from the dark side. Still, this father-son relationship isn’t one of the book’s
strong points, feeling a little thin and contrived at times, especially toward
the end.
In another private complication, Joe
is also carrying on with the wife of Tampa’s mayor and fancies the two of them
might run away to escape the corruption surrounding them. Fat chance.
Finally, there’s also a mysterious
little stranger who creeps by at odd moments in odd places: a ghost from the
bloody sorrowful past? A dark portent for a darker future? Who knows? But you’ll
keep swiping and turning the pages. As with all the best thrillers, you have to
find out.
There’s an autumnal feel to this
book, but these autumn leaves run red with blood. In Robert Lacey’s great biography
of Meyer Lansky, Little Man, Lucky
Luciano, co-founder of the modern American Mafia, is quoted as regretting that
he hadn’t led the straight life; that the gangster life had led him only to
poverty and loneliness. Like Luciano, Joe Coughlin carries some of the same regret.
And like, Luciano, he learns there’s a certain point past which it’s too late
for repentance and redemption.
Copyright 2015 by Thomas
Burchfield
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