What do you think?
Rate this book
Tony Lonto #1
Silver Street
Excellent Book
- GenresCrime
151 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
28 people want to read
About the author
E. Richard Johnson
29 books5 followersIf Emil Richard Johnson’s gritty, grim crime novels about crooks, killers, tough cops, and angry prisoners had a rare immediacy and a core of red-hot reality known to few other authors, it was no coincidence, and it didn’t come cheap. The acclaimed author of Mongo’s Back in Town and the award winning Silver Street was himself a convicted murderer and armed robber who spent most of his adult life behind bars and wrote nearly every page of his 11 mostly tough, dark works of fiction in the narrow confines of a cell at Stillwater State Prison in Minnesota. The mid-westerner had gotten into crime after returning from the army in the early 1960s. After two years of stickups he was caught during a robbery in one state and linked to another in Minnesota. The other state let Minnesota have him. A man had been killed in the stickup, and Johnson got 40 years for second-degree murder.
Johnson turned to writing as a way to pass the time in prison. After some inconsequential short pieces (some of them sold to children’s magazines), he wrote his first novel. It was about a tough, honest police detective named Tony Lonto, working an urban hell crammed with humanity’s dregs, and his job to save them from a marauding killer. The manuscript made the rounds. The legendary mystery fiction editor Joan Kahn (1914-1994) discovered it in the slush pile at Harper & Row. The topic, Silver Street, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for 1968 (it was ceremoniously handed over to him in the prison visitors’ room), and Johnson was hailed as one of the most exciting crime fiction discoveries of the decade. He produced a follow-up the next year and that did not disappoint. Mongo’s Back in Town presented a more complex story and an even more vivid picture of the criminal underworld, as a gangland hit man coming home for Christmas finds himself in the middle of corruption, treachery, and murder. The topic was as good—or better than—its award-nabbing predecessor. Film rights were bought and the topic became a well-received television movie.
Working in his cell, surrounded by colorful characters and their violent life stories, studying the tricks of writing and storytelling as he went along, Johnson produced seven topics in four years, including another Lonto thriller and the extraordinary Cage Five Is Going to Break (1970), a violent depiction of men turned into animals in captivity and a blistering attack on the American prison system. After 1971, Richard’s literary output began to sputter. He was falling into destructive patterns in Stillwater. A bad Mafia mystery, The Cardinalli Contract, appeared as a paperback original in 1975, the last of his work to be published for many years. The success and acclaim had not been enough to keep him out of trouble. Drugs, a prison escape, a return to crime on the outside, recapture, meant the hope of a reduction in his sentence evaporated.
Back in prison Johnson returned to writing. His old reputation had faded among readers, critics, and developers and his new topics were judged unpublishable. Finally, in 1988, with the help of his original editor, he got another Lonto crime story into print, The Hands of Eddy Lloyd. It came and went without much notice. Because of his bad behavior in the past, Johnson remained in Stillwater until the last day of his sentence. He came out in 1991, tried to rebuild his life and to go on writing, without much luck. In the mainstream of publishing he was considered washed up, although a growing cadre of hard-boiled and noir fiction fans came to know and worship Johnson’s early work for its dark, unrelenting vision of crime and the sort of men who commit it.
* Source
Johnson turned to writing as a way to pass the time in prison. After some inconsequential short pieces (some of them sold to children’s magazines), he wrote his first novel. It was about a tough, honest police detective named Tony Lonto, working an urban hell crammed with humanity’s dregs, and his job to save them from a marauding killer. The manuscript made the rounds. The legendary mystery fiction editor Joan Kahn (1914-1994) discovered it in the slush pile at Harper & Row. The topic, Silver Street, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for 1968 (it was ceremoniously handed over to him in the prison visitors’ room), and Johnson was hailed as one of the most exciting crime fiction discoveries of the decade. He produced a follow-up the next year and that did not disappoint. Mongo’s Back in Town presented a more complex story and an even more vivid picture of the criminal underworld, as a gangland hit man coming home for Christmas finds himself in the middle of corruption, treachery, and murder. The topic was as good—or better than—its award-nabbing predecessor. Film rights were bought and the topic became a well-received television movie.
Working in his cell, surrounded by colorful characters and their violent life stories, studying the tricks of writing and storytelling as he went along, Johnson produced seven topics in four years, including another Lonto thriller and the extraordinary Cage Five Is Going to Break (1970), a violent depiction of men turned into animals in captivity and a blistering attack on the American prison system. After 1971, Richard’s literary output began to sputter. He was falling into destructive patterns in Stillwater. A bad Mafia mystery, The Cardinalli Contract, appeared as a paperback original in 1975, the last of his work to be published for many years. The success and acclaim had not been enough to keep him out of trouble. Drugs, a prison escape, a return to crime on the outside, recapture, meant the hope of a reduction in his sentence evaporated.
Back in prison Johnson returned to writing. His old reputation had faded among readers, critics, and developers and his new topics were judged unpublishable. Finally, in 1988, with the help of his original editor, he got another Lonto crime story into print, The Hands of Eddy Lloyd. It came and went without much notice. Because of his bad behavior in the past, Johnson remained in Stillwater until the last day of his sentence. He came out in 1991, tried to rebuild his life and to go on writing, without much luck. In the mainstream of publishing he was considered washed up, although a growing cadre of hard-boiled and noir fiction fans came to know and worship Johnson’s early work for its dark, unrelenting vision of crime and the sort of men who commit it.
* Source
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 13, 2015
Seeing as I'm only the second person to reads this really good, realistic crime thriller(Johnson wrote this in prison)really deserves a much wider readership!
February 24, 2024
Compact perfection. It’s the character work that elevates the experience. How do these people have such wonderful layers in 151 pages? The rookie detective, newly promoted and assigned to work with our main detective, Lonto, plays against type. The pimps getting knocked off one by one by a vengeful vigilante are all clearly defined personalities with distinct inner lives…until they lay knifed and dumped somewhere. The lives and personalities of the prostitutes caught up in the slaughter, and the relentless police intrusion, all matter. Supporting cops, snitches and witnesses, even the coroner dealing with Lonto’s impatience…it just keeps flowering and filling out what could have been a familiar revenge-based killing spree premise. Back-stories and late reveals of real reasons for it all being so ironic, so cold, even darkly humorous - I couldn’t get enough. If the plot is not the twistiest - well, character development, character decisions and reactions - gut, or planned - those make the surprises.
The star of the show, Lonto, seems like he’ll be the weak link. Even his complicated romance doesn’t seem to counteract his coming off as a standard and perhaps bland heroic lead without much there except “Noble, good cop, come from unlikely beginnings”. But I just had to let the story progress…and Lonto in the late stages makes his own shocking, yet believable, decisions, and the author has again finished sculpting a complete person for this sordid world on Silver Street and in the dirty nooks just beyond.
And Cecil? Oh, Cecil…if you just knew what we learn about your tragic story. And yet, despite your status as one of life’s pawns, we can’t really feel sorry for you, can we? Or cheer for you. The worst part of you was blossoming before fate gave you a reason to kill. Not just some wronged everyman we can be a little sad for. Okay - maybe a little.
151 reasons I loved this book; I know this because the pages are numbered, and I’m too lazy to count paragraphs. I have another book handy by this author, and it just became near-future.
The star of the show, Lonto, seems like he’ll be the weak link. Even his complicated romance doesn’t seem to counteract his coming off as a standard and perhaps bland heroic lead without much there except “Noble, good cop, come from unlikely beginnings”. But I just had to let the story progress…and Lonto in the late stages makes his own shocking, yet believable, decisions, and the author has again finished sculpting a complete person for this sordid world on Silver Street and in the dirty nooks just beyond.
And Cecil? Oh, Cecil…if you just knew what we learn about your tragic story. And yet, despite your status as one of life’s pawns, we can’t really feel sorry for you, can we? Or cheer for you. The worst part of you was blossoming before fate gave you a reason to kill. Not just some wronged everyman we can be a little sad for. Okay - maybe a little.
151 reasons I loved this book; I know this because the pages are numbered, and I’m too lazy to count paragraphs. I have another book handy by this author, and it just became near-future.
May 25, 2025
You can't do better than this book.
It feels real. It sounds real. It talks real.
Johnson wrote it while he was serving a 40 years to life sentence in prison. How many writers do that and win an Edgar award for their first book?
You will go with Tony Lonto as he explores the world of a killer that spirals back into his own personal life.
You will always remember this story.
March 24, 2023
Published in 1968 as Silver Street. Won Mystery Writers Edgar for best first novel. Bio of author says he was “an inmate at Minnesota State Prison”. Excellent example of a gritty police procedural.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews