Curtis Urness's Blog - Posts Tagged "chicago"
Review of Little Altar Boy
Little Altar Boy, by John Guzlowski, is a gritty police thriller and then so much more. The year is 1967, but this wintry Chicago narrative is a chilling predecessor to the Summer of Love. Snow falls heavily as a nun braves her way from the Humbolt Park Murdertown area to Police Detective Hank Purcell’s door. The news she brings is just as chilling as the weather. Sister Mary Philomena has observed the new priest at her church behaving suspiciously with an altar boy. She asks Hank to give the priest a “warning” not to do it again.
After Hank and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz make a not-so-pleasant visit to the accused priest, horrible events happen: a grisly murder, an incomprehensible suicide, the heinous, brutal slaying of an animal. To complicate things even more, Hank’s college-aged daughter disappears into the hippy drug scene. Hank and Marvin are no strangers to the depravity and inhumanity of the criminals they pursue, but this sequence of evil tests their mettle. They both have seen the horrors of World War II, Hank in Europe, and Marvin in the South Pacific. Those horrors seem to Hank to be the catalyst to what is happening now.
“Maybe it was the war. All those people killed in the concentration camps, for the craziest of reasons or no reason at all. Six million Jews dead, and so many others dead, too. 50 million? 60 million? All kinds of people, mostly not soldiers, just people, moms and dads and children. Maybe the war opened a door to some kind of evil, and we haven’t figured out a way to close that door again, and if we can’t close the door these crazy murders will keep happening, keep reminding us that the evil is here.”
Hank and Marvin are hardly choirboys themselves. They are tough, vicious cops, willing to mete out brutality to anyone standing to the way of what they perceive to be justice. They cope with the crimes they confront through hard-drinking and violence. Anything goes: beatings, break-ins, even judgment and execution. Yet, their viciousness is in response to the evils they face. An unorthodox center of decency grounds both men.
Chicago in 1967 is not a politically correct city. Little Altar Boy is not a politically correct book. The characters and scenes of this multi-ethnic metropolis are described in the slang of the times. Yet, even through the prejudices and the stereotypes, there is something deeper happening, intimated by Guzlowski’s poetic conceits that describe the scene when Hank and Marvin visit a juke-joint on the Southside:
The guy with the harmonica put down his harp just then, held it tight to his chest, and shouted out a lick from some blues song, some old holler, that went all the way down to Dixie and even further than that, down to the Delta, down to Parchman Farm, down to the wet, dark mud of the black Mississippi.
The snow that billows and piles up through most of the novel develops a persona of its own. Infrequently, it descends as something magical and shiny, innocence itself; more often it is city snow, grimy, covered with soot and dog crap, slick, nasty, covering a slippery surface of ice. Even when there is the short reprieve of a thaw, it melts into a murky atmospheric muddle. The snow and freezing temperatures enhance the theme of innocence corrupted by evil that flows through the storyline. This detective tale, like revenge, is best served cold.
After Hank and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz make a not-so-pleasant visit to the accused priest, horrible events happen: a grisly murder, an incomprehensible suicide, the heinous, brutal slaying of an animal. To complicate things even more, Hank’s college-aged daughter disappears into the hippy drug scene. Hank and Marvin are no strangers to the depravity and inhumanity of the criminals they pursue, but this sequence of evil tests their mettle. They both have seen the horrors of World War II, Hank in Europe, and Marvin in the South Pacific. Those horrors seem to Hank to be the catalyst to what is happening now.
“Maybe it was the war. All those people killed in the concentration camps, for the craziest of reasons or no reason at all. Six million Jews dead, and so many others dead, too. 50 million? 60 million? All kinds of people, mostly not soldiers, just people, moms and dads and children. Maybe the war opened a door to some kind of evil, and we haven’t figured out a way to close that door again, and if we can’t close the door these crazy murders will keep happening, keep reminding us that the evil is here.”
Hank and Marvin are hardly choirboys themselves. They are tough, vicious cops, willing to mete out brutality to anyone standing to the way of what they perceive to be justice. They cope with the crimes they confront through hard-drinking and violence. Anything goes: beatings, break-ins, even judgment and execution. Yet, their viciousness is in response to the evils they face. An unorthodox center of decency grounds both men.
Chicago in 1967 is not a politically correct city. Little Altar Boy is not a politically correct book. The characters and scenes of this multi-ethnic metropolis are described in the slang of the times. Yet, even through the prejudices and the stereotypes, there is something deeper happening, intimated by Guzlowski’s poetic conceits that describe the scene when Hank and Marvin visit a juke-joint on the Southside:
The guy with the harmonica put down his harp just then, held it tight to his chest, and shouted out a lick from some blues song, some old holler, that went all the way down to Dixie and even further than that, down to the Delta, down to Parchman Farm, down to the wet, dark mud of the black Mississippi.
The snow that billows and piles up through most of the novel develops a persona of its own. Infrequently, it descends as something magical and shiny, innocence itself; more often it is city snow, grimy, covered with soot and dog crap, slick, nasty, covering a slippery surface of ice. Even when there is the short reprieve of a thaw, it melts into a murky atmospheric muddle. The snow and freezing temperatures enhance the theme of innocence corrupted by evil that flows through the storyline. This detective tale, like revenge, is best served cold.
