Chad Taylor

Crime

FINDERS KEEPERS by Mark Bowden (Atlantic Books)
MORAL HAZARD by Kate Jennings (Picador)
DEAD MEN'S WAGES by Lilian Pizzichini (Picador)
FAT OLLIE'S BOOK by Ed McBain (Orion)

Did you hear the one about the US $1.2 million that fell off the back of a Philadelphia security van and into the hands of an unemployed dockworker, Joey Coyle? Finders Keepers reads like that sort of joke, with the same cruel humour and predictable punchline.

The true life morality tale of a fool and his money is recounted by reporter Mark Bowden who first serialised Joey's story for the Philadelphia Enquirer in 1986. In chapter 2 the journalist calmly observes how the paranoid Joey stashes the cash in a hiding place under his kitchen floor; then thinks better of it and transfers it to his hot water cylinder; changes his mind and moves it again to a space under his toilet; then shifts it to a front wall crawlspace - only to fall through the ceiling as he retrieves it yet again.

This Sisyphean game of pass-the-parcel takes place over only a few hours. If Finders Keepers was fiction the labour would be surreal, like the elevator in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled that takes a chapter to rise between floors. But because Finders Keepers is true life, the scene's only significance is that Joey, a methamphetamine addict, has fried his brain. He told everyone he met about the money and gave it away in chunks. Most of the cash had disappeared by the third day and he was arrested on the seventh.

During his trial, local and national press presented Joey as a working class hero. When the charges were dropped he fell into the hands of Walt Disney who filmed his story as Money for Nothing starring John Cusack: "more Irish than Coyle", Bowden notes, and "far too articulate" to play the unemployed longshoreman.

A free man who feared the film's release, the real Joey hung himself. Bowden's brief epilogue is neither an epitaph or an apology. Coyle's death is merely the last loose end.

Kate Jennings' Moral Hazard is the story of Cath, a 1960s feminist radical who takes a job as a corporate speech writer for a Wall Street firm in the 1980s in order to support her husband, who is suffering from Alzheimer's.

The author is a 1960s feminist radical herself who also worked as a corporate speech writer for a Wall Street firm in the 1980s, also in order to support her husband was suffering from Alzheimer's.

A flinty post-modernist, Jennings maintains that Moral Hazard is fiction; that the narrative's academic, oratorial tone is merely "highly stylised" and that the fictional husband's wasting disease is "a metaphor for the financial industry".

The book's chapters alternate between grim details of the (fictional) husband's decline ("Bailey was hemorrhaging") and narrator Cath's (not Kate's) days at the office ("I already knew he wasn't a fan of Alan Greenspan...").

Cath's conversations with her Niedecker co-workers are educated feats of memory, their exchanges heavy with quotes from Whitman, Trollope, Leonard Cohen, Louis Armstrong, Ogden Nash, Jim Morrison and more.

Her powers of recall are a cruel reminder of what her husband will soon be missing but the ongoing tension between these contrasting environments is that there isn't any. Cath's - and Kate's - emotional self-denial borders on the heroic. As the author channel-grazes between flirty office talk and Bailey's journey into death, Moral Hazard starts to read less like a novel and more like a plangent memoir.

Lilian Pizzichini's Dead Men's Wages lines up her memories of her grandfather, Charlie Taylor, against his considerable criminal record as an East End gangster. "As good as a novel!" fizzed The Times, but are stories of the London underworld ever dull? The Sopranos talks down the once-glamourised American mafia but the Brits have always been awake to the life's mixture of savage, canny and banal.

(A friend of mine, an ex-Brit and a bar man told me about the Krays' visit to his mother's pub: "They stole an ashtray and said 'We'll be back.'")

Pizzichini literally digs up the past as she researches the streets Charlie walked, ("Harrow Road was once a crooked horse track used by the Celts..."), tracing his criminal career from Borstal to the army to its boon of post-blitz reconstruction contracts and and non-existent navvies - the "dead men's wages" of the book's title.

Pizzichini's London is a palimpsest of crime: an economy and culture of institutions that breeds quaint nasties like Black Fred, Pop-up Ted, Stuttering Bill and Half-pint Perkins. Some of it's talked up (while Charlie's father makes an arch return "from the muddy deathtraps of France", there's no need to spin World War I) most of the stories are rich enough run unembellished. Dead Men's Wages is a greasy tour through the shabbiest the city has to offer. As well as Oswald Mosley, the Krays and Mariella Novotny, Rod Stewart is name-checked. Twice.

Ed McBain has written has 97 novels. Fat Ollie's Book is a crime novel about a crime novel written by Oliver Wendell Weeks. (Think Chili Palmer's script that runs through Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty.) The book-within-a-book interrupts the 3rd person narrative in order to have the last word, but McBain is in synch with Ollie's world view. And so on page 8, Honey Blair, the roving reporter for the Eleven O'Clock News, "turned and followed her tits off stage." It happens all the time in real life - in Pizzichini, Jennings and Bowden's books, for instance - but in the world of fiction, it's still quite something.

(Listener)