Jersey Rascals

The word “boss” used to carry a strong political aroma; it was a term used to define specific kinds of characters who, though often unelected, wielded absolute power in big cities and large towns, power with little or no accountability.

A boss was a species of dictator. His sword was the “political machine” an often-secret government unofficially working the wheels of the officially elected government to create a spoils system. These machines were made up of fiercely loyal armies who rigged elections for the boss’s favored candidates, usually their closest friends and relations. They got dead people, among others, to the polls on election day, sometimes twice. (After all, who says that dead people don’t have rights?) These troops were rewarded in return with direct cash payments, cushy city jobs and other perks. It was nepotism as a finely honed craft. “Transparency” was for saps.

Political machine bosses benefitted a noisy minority at the expense of the larger population. Some of them were colorful characters, sometimes regarded with deep affection and unquestioned loyalty by their constituents. But they were more often hated and rarely mourned when they passed away, either to the Great Beyond or into a gray prison cell.

Bosses accrued both great power and great wealth. Their influence reached upward and outward. They would rig state elections for their cats-paw candidates, pushing their influence into both state senate and executive offices, and even into the federal government. For many, they remain the clearest symbol of big-city corruption during the last two centuries of American history.

 Among the most legendary of this motley crew of crooks were “Boss Tweed,” who ran New York City’s Tammany Hall in the 1850s; James Farley who bossed New York State during FDR’s administration; and Mayor Richard Daley who ran Chicago until late in the last century.

While researching my upcoming novel, Butchertown, I excavated a little nugget of a book called American Dictators, by Steven Hart, a dual biography that casts a small, revealing spotlight on two lesser-known, but nevertheless sterling masters of twentieth-century bossism.

Subtitled Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine, this is a slim book, especially considering it describes two larger-than-life characters. What facts Hart was able to excavate about Hague (elected mayor of Jersey City, 1917–1937) and Enoch “Nucky” Johnson (unelected sachem of Atlantic City around the same time) comes almost solely from the bare dry bones of public records and the ambiguous trails left in magazine and newspaper articles.

Because they played on smaller stages than, say, Huey Long, Hague and Johnson were better able to hide themselves, their hearts and minds, behind a heavy curtain. Neither man left letters or diaries; nor did they conduct many interviews, even the loquacious, hard-partying Nucky Johnson. And no around them was ever willing—or allowed—to talk at any length. Many secrets lie silent in many graves.

Even so, American Dictators is readable and interesting, even if you’re not from the wilds of urban New Jersey. Students of American political history and the intersection of crime and politics will find it particularly interesting—as will viewers of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which all but fictionalizes Nucky Johnson right out of history (and is also a show that I have given up on—ask and we’ll discuss, here or on Facebook.)

FRANK HAGUE, SQUARE-LIVING BULLY

Of the two, author Hart seems most fascinated with Frank Hague. Hague ruled over Jersey City, New Jersey, which, in those days, was a gritty factory town across the Hudson River from Manhattan (and is now a major financial center known as “Wall Street West”).

Hague was born in 1876 in the city’s poor and rowdy Irish-American “Horseshoe” neighborhood, a Republican-gerrymandered district. He ran with street gangs before becoming a fairly successful fight manager. In 1896, he was persuaded to run for constable of Jersey City as a Democrat.

Two years later, he was elected deputy sheriff. A contempt-of-court charge later stripped him of his badge, but his very public loyalty in committing perjury for a friend in another court matter made him an extremely popular figure with the Horseshoe’s poor and working-class Irish voters. Ethnic and neighborhood loyalty worked as a higher form of ethics in these circumstances, right or wrong.

As he rose, Hague became an able opportunist, making and breaking alliances, hopping political fences, a leopard that changed his spots with ease. He first developed a genuine reputation as a serious reformer, winning the favor of both progressive and religious groups in successful battles against prostitution and the drug trade. He was finally appointed mayor of Jersey City in 1917. (The city was run under the commission form of government at the time.)

Once Hague became mayor, though, reform was kicked to the gutter, especially once Prohibition rolled out in 1920. Whatever his reputation for reform, he quickly forgot it. The one-time champion of labor unions became their enemy, for example. He amassed an illegal fortune, wielded absolute power, and stretched his influence throughout state government and onto the national scene, even creating headaches for fellow Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Mayor Hague ruled Jersey City for thirty straight years, winning rigged election after rigged election until 1947. He was a paradox: a crude, hard-nosed teetotaler. Dominated by his mother, shy around women, his lips never touched liquor though he fully tolerated bootlegging and gambling, so long as he received his cut of the action, a private “tax,” often collected through a secret drawer built into his city hall desk.

“I am the law!” he famously bellowed when challenged. Indeed, this otherwise bashful figure laid the law down like a trowel for most of his reign. He used Jersey City police as his own S.S. He branded all opponents as communist inspired and subjected them to brutal public assault. He passed laws limiting dissent, which were enforced even after they were ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. He was truly an American dictator.

But as Frank Hague grew older, so did his Irish constituency. As they passed away, their children moved out to the suburbs and the new emigrants filling the vacuum left behind had no interest in him or his bully culture. Finally, his corrupt kingdom passed into new hands and he faded away. 

NUCKY JOHNSON: PARTY GANGSTER

Nucky Johnson, the boss of Atlantic City, king of the Boardwalk Empire, was of brighter tinsel than dour abstemious Frank Hague. A Republican, Johnson’s only elected offices were sheriff and county treasurer. Once he was appointed treasurer he refused to run again, declaring that elections were beneath the dignity of a machine boss—a king should never have to trowel for votes, like a clam digger. And anyway, serving as chairman of the County Republican Party proved much more lucrative.

Hague had a long climb up his ladder. Nucky was luckier. The son of county sheriff whose jurisdiction included Atlantic City, he was born near the top rungs. Atlantic City was a resort city, a refuge of pleasure, from the first brick laid. Once Nucky got ahold of the purse strings, he tore a piece off every dollar that passed through the city coffers. He also became the resort’s number-one vacationer, never rising before six p.m., never going to bed before six a.m.

Nucky Johnson looked like a mild-mannered banker, but he mixed business with pleasure as adeptly as a bartender mixing a powerhouse martini, squiring showgirls on one arm, collecting bribes and payoffs with the other as he painted the town fifty shades of red. He became the affable but utterly corrupt ambassador of Atlantic City, a gangland Babbitt, passing out favors for everyone, including the city’s large black population. As long as the money rolled in for everyone, few minded Nucky’s corruption.

Somewhat to his credit, Johnson kept a relative peace during his reign, a peace that was especially appreciated during the blood-soaked Prohibition years, as New York and Chicago blazed with mind-boggling gang violence.

In fact, Atlantic City became a DMZ for gangsters like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano to get away from gunplay. It was so peaceful, that Johnson himself played host, in 1929, to what some crime historians call the first national convention of organized crime figures (which led to the establishment of the modern American Mafia in the early 1930s).

The details of the meetings will remain forever speculative—though damn it, wouldn’t we all love to be a fly on that wall—but Nucky was in his element then—drinks on the house for everyone.

Astute as Nucky Johnson was, though, he didn’t have Hague’s attention to detail, ruthless backing, and tough guy’s ability to hang on to power, no matter what. He fell in part due to the weight of his own gluttonous appetites.

As has happened with many crooks, Johnson’s reported modest taxable income failed to tally with his opulent lifestyle. This, of course, drew the eye of the Feds. By 1941, he was off to the pen, convicted of tax evasion. He returned to Atlantic City in 1945 to find his city in the hands of a new boss. He lived out his life as a ghost in a fading city, a place that he made shine more than any other individual. (Atlantic City’s decline is best captured in Louis Malle’s and John Guare’s superb film, Atlantic City, with Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon; Nucky even rates a mention there. Boardwalk Empire, for all its violent flamboyance, does him little justice, exchanging his reality as an adept showboating juggler of power for Tony Soprano light.)

Hart’s book ends with some interesting conclusions, among them, that though undemocratic and ruthless, urban bosses also often set a place at the table for ethnic minorities who had otherwise been kept from influence and power by the majority. (There were also other “bosses” who were less ruthless and corrupt than Johnson and Hague.)

 “Machines” as Hart describes them, are still with us. All city governments work like machines and can work no other way.

It takes a lot of organization to coordinate and run a small land area containing thousands of millions of people, a task the old bosses were good at (though often for the wrong reasons). Only governments have the chops to run towns and cities, not capitalist corporations whose interests are narrow and short-term (and who depend on the government for their business much more than any Randian libertarian wants you to know).

It’s not too much though, to ask that these machines are run with more transparency, by individuals who achieve their power in a democratic manner and who act accordance with the broad interests of the citizens. Mayors and their ilk needn’t—and shouldn’t—be saints. But they have to be better than the likes of Hague and Johnson.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield recently finished his novel Butchertown, a 1920s shoot-'em-up. He can be found on Facebook and Twitter. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Butchertown Chronicles: Draft 2, Slightly Nervous

THE LAST BULLET . . . .

Morning: The writer is preparing his upcoming novel for distribution and review to his select group of beta readers when nausea suddenly surges.

Who the hell wrote this crap? he grumbles, his mouth still crusted with sleep. Then he sighs: He knows the answer. Its whiskered visage stares back every morning from a spotted mirror.

A pent-up hiss whistles out his teeth. He moves on with his grim lonely work.

Butchertown, the writer’s novel, is far enough along that he’s decided to send it toddling around the block to see what the neighbors think. No matter the fear. No matter what they might do.

And believe it, he knows very well what they might do.

At night, the writer fears sleep, because there, underneath the black tarp, bad dreams lurk, portentous nightmares of dismal reviews:

“Former Local Hack Again Humiliates Hometown: School Council to Strike Burchfield’s Name from Records After Literary Effort Flunks Literacy Test”: Peekskill News Service

“If you’ve been waiting for a revival of the Roaring Twenties gangster novel, wait another ninety years. So bad, it’s the best advertisement for the re-institution of Prohibition I’ve ever read.”—Single Malt and Beer Monthly.

“It’s a shame bad books aren’t printed on paper anymore, otherwise I’d throw this latest crock by Burchfield right in the fireplace. Oh hell, guess I’ll take this hammer to my Kindle instead”—John Pilcrow, Pushcart Prize award winner (and real-life writer).

“Citing Burchfield Novel, Congress Unanimously Passes Censorship Law; Obama Promises to Sign. ‘We’ve Got to Do Something About This Flood of Bad Books!’ Says Speaker Boehner.”

The writer sincerely believes joking will help ease his anxiety.

That in itself is funny.

WHAT BUTCHERTOWN IS ABOUT

The writer now believes he can spill a little more about Butchertown, work up some anticipation among readers, both old and new.

The year is 1922, two years into the ruinous idealism known as Prohibition. The place: a highly fictionalized Northern California. The hero, Paul Bacon, a young up-and-coming junior assistant city attorney, glib fashion plate, and love-struck Lothario, ferries across the Bay one fogbound Friday evening, about to step out on the worst date of his life.

Through Butchertown’s frantic, bloody pages race dames sultry and devious, two motley gangs of trigger-happy mobsters, fatally obsessed Prohibitionists, two-fisted brawls, and hair-raising escapes down endless warrens of grimy alleys. The bullets fly, the bodies pile up. The air gets so hot, even water catches fire.

Somehow too, a love story flowers from the mud and grime, a good and offbeat one; or so the writer believes, the sap.

Butchertown fits in a number of genres: Roaring ‘20s shoot-’em-up, cat-n’-mouse thriller, fish-out-of-water story, noir mystery. Its roots lie in the crimson soil of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, sprinkled with the fizz and spectacle found in novels and stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Jazz Age writers and journalists; and maybe a tinge of Eric Ambler for its coiled viperous intrigue and the innocent soul who blunders into and through its treacherous landscape.

Butchertown in no way mocks or brushes away the laws of physics, but it is a kind of horror tale. But, as the meat-ax title implies, it serves up a brimming bowl of horror. The writer is even considering warning labels, and fears he may be forced to cover the eyes of anyone he sees reading it, yes, even those of Stephen King.

It may be a good sign that the writer is scared by his own book.

A FEW FRACTIONS MORE . . . .

The second draft of Butchertown comes to a mere 263 pages, around 77,000 words. The writer hopes to trim a few fractions more.

How did it come up so short this time? Simple: Butchertown is told from a single, first-person POV over one extremely harrowing weekend, from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. A single POV means tighter focus and less plot juggling.The reason why

Of course, shorter does not mean better, but as far as story and plot go, the writer experiences waves of pleasure with Butchertown.

Sometimes he actually says out loud (while alone), “The birth of my book is inherently more interesting and exciting than royal queenly people birthing babies or whatever it is they do over there.”

Yes, he is that self-obsessed—He doesn’t even care what they name the baby!

The writer bets that crime and suspense fans will especially like Butchertown because, out in the world, what the writer thinks matters little. Someone has to like his book besides him. Preferably lots of people. Lack of readership is no indicator of literary virtue either, crabby Bohos to the contrary.

As for bestsellerdom, like his pleasure-loving hero, the writer knows there are better odds at the race track. But he goes on writing anyway, for reasons that will remain mystifying as long as he lives.

As for more literary questions, there is the common quandary about to handle the plot. The setting seems vivid but the author is frankly undecided about how much of the real NorCal of the 1920s to use. As for literary matters of style—or non-bad writing--that’s for the final baking.

Whatever Butchertown’s current flaws, the writer thinks his book is good. That’s not a new thought. Now he needs some people to tell him whether or not it’s true and what he can do to make it even better.

And so he reaches out to those Lucky 7, those readers, both writers and not, to get their opinions and insights. You might well be one of them (yes, even you, vile Pilcrow!)

As a first-timer named Robert Galbraith recently found out, even great is not good enough. (The man got so desperate, the author hears, he’s started passing himself off as J.K. Rowling!)

The author strokes his mustache, then suddenly sits bolt upright, grabs his phone and dials:

“Steve . . . Steve King? Tom Burchfield here . . . say, I got this book comin’ out in a while and I’m wondering if you’d mind . . . you would? Great! I knew you’d be a pal!”

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Elizabeth Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has just completed BUTCHERTOWN , a 1920s gangster shoot-'em-up. He can be “friended” on Facebook and tweeted at on Twitter. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Butchertown Chronicles: First Draft

FINISHING

Around the first of September, my health shaky, my mind fluttering and befogged, I shuffled to the end of the first draft of my next novel Butchertown. I finished later than expected, figuring June or July. Didn’t happen.

Butchertown is a gangster thriller set in 1922 in a fictionalized West Coast city. First among its antecedents is Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Some may hear an echo of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire while others will sense the ominous thunder of the original The Untouchables TV series and the original Scarface. But whatever the echoes, I hope readers will forget them, as they’re pulled into its bloody torrent.

One quality of a great genre novel is that it gives the reader the illusory feeling that they’ve never read anything like it before, though they have many times. From my own experience, I think of Red Harvest, Ghost Story, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Among more recent books, The Sisters Brothers gave me that vibe. I hope readers will have the same experience with Butchertown.

The first draft of Butchertown runs a total of 231 pages and over 67,000 words. Those of you who were around during early Dragon’s Ark days will recall the first draft of that book topped 600 pages, around 170,000 words.

Butchertown’s page/word count represents quite a drop, but is easily explained. Dragon’s Ark was told from multiple viewpoints. The events stretched over a period of months. Butchertown, like many—maybe most—noir novels, is told in first person singular; further, its querulous events tumble across a compressed period of time, namely one really horribly long weekend and a day.

No worries about over length here. However, I do feel a little concerned with under length; with a writing a tale that comes off as an undernourished herky-jerky, Post-modern mashup of older, better books, rather like Tarantino movies at their most annoying.

Writing the draft went smoothly. (Then again, I wonder if that isn’t always the case. The words bubble and sizzle quickly up on the screen as I jam along, their true worth unnoticed until much later, when I see them, thin and lonely, stranded across bleak snowfields of paper.)

As I finished each chapter, I would read it aloud to my wife, Elizabeth, who, whatever her natural and correct biases, found the story to be a ripping, gripping page turner. That was the first thing I needed to know.

My pace slowed along with me when I fell ill in early July. I lived in gaps of thoughtless time, wobbling at the office door before retreating back to bed to the warm bliss of sleep and the sleek rectangle of my i-Pad. I even took to handicapping horse races just to keep the brain cells mindlessly churning. I hated the news and rejected all attempts at profundity.

Finally, as recovery slowly began and a wedding anniversary/recuperative vacation approached, some kind of closing appeared called for. The last two chapters floated up in the anemic pond of my miasma. I scooped them off the surface and poured them out.

When I returned home, I let the draft stew and simmer out of sight a couple of weeks more, as my body continued to heal. At the end of September, I printed it out in double-space, 12-point Roman and sat down at the dining nook table to read it over line by line, paragraph by paragraph.

RE-READING

As I predicted, writing the first draft was a lot more fun than reading it. I promised myself that I wouldn’t stop to wrestle and fuss over every tree, but instead read it for the forest; meaning for its general attributes such as flow, story, and the general cloth of its characters. I found, after a while though, that I couldn’t really keep that promise.

For one, those weedy details count for a lot: do I need that strand? Do I not? Do I need it here or elsewhere—this is especially a problem with crime clues. A mystery writer is always caught in the dilemma between giving away the game too soon or waiting too long so it looks he’s dumping a thousand rabbits out of his hat.

Further, filigree is not always merely filigree. A choice of neck scarf, an allergy to certain materials matter; even one’s choice of drink might be a life and death trigger. The stray detail, spit out, slapped down, considered useless suddenly becomes a thin but strong stand in the larger web, while another lovingly detailed and admired moment means nothing after all and is discarded with only a pang.

So, I slowed down, but not too much, dodging entanglements with the always absorbing details of adjectives, adverbs, and sentence structure. I swore a lot, left red slashes like Freddy Krueger, circled with question marks, and jotted down actual questions.

Sometimes all I could do was emit a self-forgiving sigh, mumble something about Shakespeare et al writing pages of absolute shit before getting it right. (I’m the only one who really has to smell it.) Then I moved on.

On many days, rereading and rewriting Butchertown is only a job like any other. Let no one call this romance. Ecstasy is brief and fleeting. Like the English say so aptly, “Well, get on with it then!”

BRIEF CONCLUSIONS

No, not an entirely pleasant experience. Though I think my story an excellent one, its tissue remains distressingly patchy in many places, especially toward the end, the Sick Section, as you might call it.

One thing I like very much is my protagonist, a fellow seldom seen in the back alleys of crime and thriller fiction nowadays. (Those who’ve read my criticism likely know my attitude toward contemporary genre heroes.) I’m already outlining a new adventure to maneuver him in to. By force, if necessary. “My characters,” a favorite writer of mine was known to say, “are slaves.”

My antagonists so far, are a colorful, meaty stew of femme fatales, trigger-happy lowlifes, thugs, and self-styled schemers, grimy and unwashed with one or two exceptions. There are two others characters whose appearances I hope surprise, as people like these don’t often appear in this genre (or are treated with any understanding.) Some characters are still much too scrawny, too much in the wallpaper and need to be brightened and beefed up, pushed into this small arena, into the bloody swirling chaos of Butchertown.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The Butchertown Chronicles: Pleasures and Perils of Research

Before I started my bullet-packed crime novel, Butchertown, my knowledge of Prohibition revolved around its gangsters. (Tales of copious gunfire tend to focus a man.) I've read several biographies of Al Capone, plus crime histories such as The Bootleggers and Their Era. I am also well-acquainted with the story of New York’s Five Families, whose seed was planted by a gambler named Arnold Rothstein. My failed try at a Mafia novel (a Westlakean-Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight farce) in the late 1990s, gave me an excuse to read two shelves of books on American organized crime, though most of those covered the post-Prohibition era.

To fill in Butchertown’s dark picture, I need more. The setting alone—Northern California in 1922 —demands that I drill both deep into the past and fly high over it to see its broader scope.

Prohibition was more than gangsters and gun battles, flappers and hip flasks, tommy guns and one-way rides, jazz and Fitzgerald. A whole huge world surrounded and infused it, to American shores and beyond: There's “Context” as wonks say. As Prohibition made the world, the world also made Prohibition.

The first book I stopped at was, amazingly, A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday) with original art and text by Laura Cunningham, an exhilarating fusion of science, soul, and an artist’s imagination. State of Change tells the epic environmental history of California, with exquisite paintings and drawings by Cunningham that take you back to the epoch before European and Russian settlers arrived, when grizzly bears roamed the oak-studded Oakland hills. It’s one of those books that transform non-fiction into art and literature.

But why would stray so far afield? Mostly because I want to expose a little of the roots of Butchertown’s setting, a highly fictionalized East Bay city, in order to illuminate the Now of the Story.

But then, I had to put State of Change aside and move on, because, beautiful object that it is, I gleaned enough knowledge for my specific task. I hope I can  finish it someday. That’s the way this writer researches—get what you need, leave the rest for later. For now, I’ll call it one of the greatest gift books you could ever give.

The next tome I took off the stack was One Eye Closed, the Other Red: The California Bootlegging Years by Clifford James Walker (Back Door Publishing 2001). This one should have gone off like dynamite, but instead turned out be a damp firecracker.

One Eye Closed presented me with a good news/bad news dilemma. The good news is that it’s stuffed to its boards with information on Prohibition in California, much of told by those enterprising desperate characters who lived through it. From time to time, it pops with wonderful anecdotes of life on the edge in Prohibition California.

The bad news is that One Eye Closed is an unreadable ram shack. Information-wise, it’s a labor of love, that, sadly, seems to have been finished and rushed to market with both eyes closed—poorly organized with, according to my professional editor’s eye, no editing and proofreading at all. It’s often a painful armchair experience.

I stuck with it to the end, but skimmed like a flat stone over a pond in large sections and sighed a loud “too bad” as I finished. Someday, someone should buy the publishing rights, tear it down, and rebuild it. Then it’ll pop and crackle with the spirits within.  For now, One Eye Closed is for real history geeks only and, for the rest, serves as a lesson about the real perils of self-publishing.

When The Rivers Ran Red: An Amazing Story of Courage and Triumph in America's Wine Country by Vivienne Sosniski (Palgrave MacMillan), published the old-fashioned way, was much more coherent and pleasurable. Ms. Sosniski's book shines valuable light on a little-known corner of Prohibition in California —Napa and Sonoma counties, the capitals of American winemaking. It’s a colorful and pleasurable read, both sad and inspiring. 

Prohibition was not only a law-enforcement disaster, but it brought economic and personal ruin to thousands of vintners and related industries all over, ripping up an entire culture by its roots. Thanks to Prohibition, California wine, highly regarded back then even in Europe, suffered a blow to its reputation that lasted decades as the skills it took to make it were lost. (I remember, back in the 1960s, how my father, the French wine connoisseur, proudly scoffed away the very idea of California wine splashing over his tender, delicate tongue.)

Both these books also make it clear that the vast majority of California bootleggers, while technically law breakers, weren’t true criminals. And even the thugs weren’t especially plagued by the fungus that causes itchy trigger finger syndrome. The real crooks worked so deeply in the dark—they weren’t exhibitionists like Capone—that very little is known about them, nor where or how many bodies were buried--certainly, nowhere as many as in Chicago, New York, and, the bloodiest territory of all, Detroit.

Prohibition wine may have turned California’s rivers red, but Prohibition blood, not so much.

[To be continued]


(Re-edited 10/10/11; 10/11/11)

A NOTE: I’ll be gone from this tiny space next week on a soul-stirring journey to the wilds of Southern Colorado. I will return with fine photos, my spirit infused by the Greater Reality, and maybe even an account of my first attempt at fly-fishing (if I don't rip my eye from its socket). Until then, get the hell out from behind that computer and Live the Life that You’ve Been Given.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Author

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.