Murder by the Numbers: Eliot Ness and the Cleveland Mob Wars - Hardcover

Collins, Max Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312088566 ISBN 13: 9780312088569

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

Synopsis

In 1938 Cleveland, Eliot Ness finds himself in the midst of a racially explosive war between the Italian mob and the black numbers racket.

About this title

Reviews

The fourth Eliot Ness novel from the prolific Collins ( Bullet Proof ), who also pens the Dick Tracy comic strip, is action-packed but essentially lifeless (despite the fact that many of the characters are actual figures). Former Untouchable Ness (who sent Al Capone to prison on tax evasion charges) has moved from Chicago to Cleveland, where he is out to break up the Mayfield Road mob, which five years earlier, in 1933, eliminated black numbers king Rufus Murphy. Forging an uneasy alliance with black detective Toussaint Johnson, and counting on the smoldering resentment of the black community, Ness assembles 70 witnesses and goes to the grand jury. Indictments follow for two Mayfield kingpins, Salvatore Lombardi and the sadistic Angelo Scalise. With a tip of the hat to Cleveland's Depression-era black crime novelist Chester Himes (whom he depicts working at the city's Karamu Theater), Collins effectively evokes the era, but his characters--the square-jawed, uncompromising Ness and slimy, sinister gangsters--remain cartoonish.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Legendary cop Elliot Ness, who's become a fixture in Collins's fact-based novels (Bullet Proof, 1989, etc.), goes up against Cleveland's Mayfield Road gang, the brainchild of two cousins, Black Sal Lombardi and Angelo Scalise, who've muscled in on the formerly black East Side numbers racket in 1938. The Mayfield gang runs a tight ship--interlopers are terrorized and informants executed--and it's only with the help of compromised Officer Toussaint Johnson, an old intimate of numbers banker Rufus Murphy, that Ness is able to break its grip on the city. Gritty details of interracial crime and punishment (the crime inevitably more rousing) enliven this otherwise routine Black Mask pastiche. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312088566
• ISBN 13: 9780312088569
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 209