Customer Reviews

Mobtown

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The time is 1959, Ike Van Savage, P.I. is hired by Vicky Petrone, wife of the mobster, Joe Petrone. Vicky tells Ike that her husband intends to kill her. Her reason is that he knows she's no longer in love with him and she knows that Joe's first two wives died under questionable circumstances.

In this noir story, Rochester, New York is described as a town run by the mob. We learn a great deal about the city at that time, the politics, the parties by the lake and the manner in which the police seem to look the other way when the mob is at work.

Ike is involved in a number of related cases. Paddy Doyle, a slum landlord, who owns buildings downtown, refuses to sell his buildings to the mob. He sees one of his buildings after another, go up in smoke. Paddy asks Ike's help in bringing the arsonist to justice before he, Paddy, is forced to do it himself.

While working for Paddy Doyle, Ike is asked to investigate business owner Eddie Gill. His wife is suspicious and wants Eddie followed. Ike confirms her suspicions as he sees Eddie with a sixteen-year-old girl who worked for him. Eddie takes the girl to a night club and a motel.

Ike's investigation of these cases takes him around the city and his descriptions are vivid and timely. I particularly enjoyed the sequence when Ike was at a dance club where Stagger Lee was playing and words from the song melted in with the action.

I enjoy this kind of story with good action and knowing that I'm experiencing the events without a psychological approach to the character's actions.

The dialogue is excellent and reminds me of the great Raymond Chandler's P.I. Philip Marlow. Neither P.I. takes a back seat to threats and they get the job done at all costs. It's easy to visualize what is happening when the reader is given words like this, "We looked at each other, she tightened her eyes, and I knew she was talking the truth. Whatever it was between us was roaring down the tracks and it knocked my bitterness out of the way like so much horse feathers."

Yeah, baby!

Rochester is a town known more for Kodak than crime, but even in Western New York, 1959 the rackets are going strong. Joe Petrone is the local wiseguy and, according to wife #3, he has about as much loyalty to his betrotheds as did King Henry VIII. He's making noises like he's tired of her, and she wants Private Eye Dwight Van Savage to make sure she doesn't "accidentally" drive off a cliff or fall asleep in the bathtub.

"Ike" Van Savage makes for a good character because he's ordinary enough to earn the reader's trust and sympathy, just noble enough to keep going despite the odds stacked against him, and just dangerous enough to keep things interesting. Beyond all that, he seemed to be a good guy and a loving father. His scenes with his nine-year old daughter are both sweet and realistic, without being cloying. Ike may be hard-boiled on his surface, but his interior is warmer than Marlowe's every was.

Author Jack Kelly has not only created a likeable protagonist, but he has placed him in a fruitful setting as well. It's nice to read something a little off the beaten path, and Rochester seems like as good a place as easy to have a shot and a beer, and get beaten over the head. His evocation of 1950s America is excellent, with all the details down pat, from the cars and the clothes, to the smells in the air.

Highly recommended...

Is it too much to ask for one of today's writers to hammer out a decent private eye novel? Kelly's MOBTOWN has a decent premise, starts out fine, but quickly becomes just another story about a divorced ex-cop private eye who smokes pot when he's depressed and moans about not being able to help people. I skimmed the whole last third of the book, tired of the same old garbage today's mystery writers have been turning out over the last 20 years. And unless you were around in 1959, when the story takes place, you'll be lost with all the pop-culture references. I loved the sequence where our hero Ike Van Savage made a promise to his daughter to be on time for her birthday and - SHOCKER! - was tied up by the cops for several hours answering questions about a murder and missed the party. How original. And the identity of one of the killers will be obvious, especially if you've read a lot in this genre. Go read Max Allan Collins instead if you want a period mystery, or any of the old-time pulp writers who knew how to tell this kind of story.

Private detective Van Savage pays the bills doing divorce work--dependable work in 1950s Rochester N.Y. where infidelity is common and as the modern age is being born. When a beautiful woman walks into his office with a story about her husband, Savage thinks it's more of the same. When she tells him that her husband is trying to kill her, as he's killed two previous wives, Savage is curious. When he finds out that the husband is the major figure in Rochester's mob, he knows he's in trouble.

Author Jack Kelly writes with a hard-hitting style that pays homage to the hard-boiled detectives of an earlier generation of mysteries while saying something fresh as well. His view of the 1950s as a time when the mob ruled, when honest cops were set up and destroyed, and when a day of hard work is followed by a night of hard drinking rings true. Savage is a sympathetic protagonist with family troubles and who just can't seem to stick to his own decision to keep his feelings out of what is going on.

A couple of coincidences bring together Savage's cases in ways that strain but don't break credibility but otherwise MOBTOWN is a small gem.

"Mobtown" is Rochester, New York, circa 1959, and the head mobster seems to have a piece of just about everything and everyone, including private eye Ike Van Savage's client, who has the misfortune of being the third wife of the twice widowed mobster and is convinced her husband plans to make her his third late wife. Van Savage is also involved in two other cases as he is hired by a woman whose philandering husband is involved with a sixteen-year-old girl and tries to track down the cause of several arson fires hitting a slumlord's tenements. For Van Savage, the jobs are hardly easy. His clients, like nearly everyone else in the town, are not necessarily to be trusted. Moreover, Van Savage seeks to maintain a relationship with his ten-year-old daughter, the product of his now defunct marriage.

MOBTOWN is firmly in the noir tradition, generally to good effect. Kelly effectively strips the 1950s of the veneer of civility and family values with which nostalgia has endowed the decade. Rochester emerges as a thoroughly corrupt town. Even heroes, such as boxing great Rocky Marciano, seem tainted and disgusted by what they see. Kelly does an especially admirable job in portraying the race relations of an era poised between a conflict in Korea and the domestic upheaval of the 1960s.

Whether MOBTOWN succeeds in emulating the tradition of Chandler, Cain, Hammett, or Spillane is doubtful. Kelly's style and writing, though clearly polished, lack the bite of his noir predecessors. But there is something more to MOBTOWN, something important. The novel is part history lesson, and that lesson is itself a dichotomy. On the one hand, there are the names, dates, and events with which Kelly liberally endows the novel. These references are to be expected in any period piece, but they hardly establish the novel's credentials - nor should one expect them to. Still, Kelly does a solid job placing the reader in 1959 Rochester and conveying his knowledge of the city and its history.

What is more important, though, is the second portion of that history lesson. History is, of course, a malleable quantity. Whether written by the winners or skewed through ideological eyes, history is often largely what the teller wishes to convey. From this standpoint, MOBTOWN emerges as an exceptionally interesting novel. That an American city has a problem with organized crime, even in 1959, is hardly earth-shattering. The mobsters themselves are not especially absorbing as they do what mobsters tend to do. But beneath the obvious, hidden behind the action and the double crosses and the deaths, Kelly is doing something more. MOBTOWN is about the America of the 1950s or, more accurately, a common perception of that America and several characters who hide their darker selves beneath a façade suitable to the time. Whether Kelly succeeds in removing the veneer to expose a substantially darker time and place is, of course, subjective. I, at least, found that MOBTOWN left me with something to consider after I had finished the final page.

Mobtown by Jack Kelly is a well researched crime novel set in Rochester, NY during the summer of 1959. Kelly does a great job in conjuring up that particular place and time.

Early on in Mobtown, the novel's protagonist and narrator, Ike Van Savage PI, is hired by Vicky Petrone, the beautiful wife of a local crime boss who has reason to believe her husband wants to kill her. As the investigation unfolds, Van Savage finds out there may be a connection between this case and two other cases he has on his plate. One a series of arsons, the other an adultery investigation. Eventually, Ike and the reader both learn in piecemeal fashion that Vicky has a very interesting past that she had failed to voluntarily reveal.

My problem with this otherwise appealing book centers around the way in which the various plot threads are ultimately tied together and resolved. Without giving too much away, I will only say that the novel's surprise ending is less thsn satisfying. The guilty party who is finally brought to justice is someone who in the real world would lack the means, motivation and street smarts necessary to carry out the complex web of crime the author has described.

Jack Kelly is obviously a talented writer. A less contrived, more convincing plot, would have made Mobtown a great crime novel.

Mobtown is a totally fun ride. Colorful characters, a snappy plot, magnificent in it's detail of time and place. A richly painted film noir on paper. Read it.

Jack Kelly's latest novel, Mobtown, is rock-solid noir, Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler style, or a like a Humphrey Bogart film. The characters are well defined, the setting is vivid and the mystery is like a giant jigsaw puzzle with pieces lying all over the place waiting to be fit together.

A cop kicked off the force for having morals, Ike Van Savage turns private investigator working the city streets of Rochester, New York. He's hired by a woman who wants to find out if her husband is fooling around. An Irish man hires Van Savage to find out for sure who is setting fire to his slum-rental properties. A good looking dame has hired him afraid her husband is going to try and kill her. The seriousness of this problem-her husband is part of the Arm in Rochester. He's well connected. He's with the Mob.

During a heat wave where temperatures fluctuate consistently in the high nineties with unbearable humidity, Van Savage is sucked into the underworld of organized crime and this one case could wind up being his last. He finds out the truth about who was behind having him taken off the force. People are trying to kill him.

Mobtown is poetically written in that classic noir style. Machine gun sentences-pop, pop, pop, pop-riddle the pages. Jack Kelly provides constant clever and witty dialogue. He knows how to build intense scenes and carry his characters through them. An exciting and entertaining story. I would love to see more of Ike Van Savage.
--Phillip Tomasso III, author of Third Ring, Tenth House and Mind Play

This was my first Jack Kelly book, but it won't be my last. I grew up in a very small town in east Texas, spent some time in Dallas, but mainly never really saw any 'bad guys.' So, I like to read 'tough guy' stories about the underbelly of life. My insulated upbringing might also explain my fascination with THE GODFATHER and THE SOPRANOS.

No matter MY background...this story, set in the late 1950's in Rochester, New York, about a rough-around-the-edges private eye is a great read.

Ike Van Savage, a Korean vet with a new divorce and a 10 year old daughter, doesn't turn away any clients. He need to pay the bills. So when the wife of a particularly oily character asks her to tail her husband, he accepts. This assignment is a no brainer. Eddie Gill is cheating on his wife with a cute young thing. The young girl comes to Ike's office while he's out....next thing he knows, she ends up dead.

Enter Vicky Petrone, trophy wife of one of Rochester's most noted mobsters. She thinks her husband is out to kill her. HE ends up dead.

A pattern is developing here....hang out with Ike Savage and you'll end up on the wrong side of the dirt.

The way Kelly ties all the story lines together is plausible, although I had a hard time following the 'spoiled, rich kid' angle that's introduced to further interest in Joe Petrone.

Kelly has said he plans to "carry the series throughout the 1960s" because he's "interested to see Ike's reaction to the social changes of the decade."

I'll be reading whatever Kelly writes. And, I'll be waiting to see who Hollywood casts in the movie adaptations!

Enjoy!

I didn't enjoy reading this book. I think the noir type writing made me feel like I was reading a spoof that was too long. I enjoyed the Rochester references... maybe I just don't enjoy detective noir... although I enjoyed Agatha Christie... but I think that's not "noir".