Two Recent Novels Set in Chicago

"All roads--always, always--lead back to Chicago."

-Peter Orner, The Gossip Columnist's Daughter

 

More even than Rome? And I thought I was a Chicago booster...

 

I read two new releases set in Chicago. The first one was:

 

Rob Osler/The Case of the Murdered Muckraker (2026)

 

This is the second case in a new series about Harriet Morrow, the Lesbian, bike-riding first female detective at the Prescott Agency in Chicago. It takes place in 1898. The Pinkertons (historical fact) had hired their first female agent not long before, and Theodore Prescott thinks it could work for him as well. But Morrow is still on probation, even in this her second case.

 

Eugene Eldridge is an investigative journalist, who has evidence about corruption among Chicago aldermen. (Shocking, I know.) He's stabbed while in a tenement near the Stockyards. Where did the evidence go? Somebody in the tenement must have seen something, and maybe Morrow, posing as a worker from a settlement house, is more likely to earn their trust?

 

The recurring characters in this series are fun: the orphaned Harriet Morrow, looking after her younger brother, her boss Theodore Prescott, her fellow detectives. Her possible girlfriend. The plot is strong as well. It's a series I'll continue to follow.

 

Peter Orner/The Gossip Columnist's Daughter (2025) 

 

The gossip columnist is Irv Kupcinet, known around Chicago as Kup. He was an actual newspaperman and from 1943 until he died in 2003, he wrote a gossip column for the Chicago Sun-Times. "Among the guests at Joan Crawford's Mental Health Ball at the Conrad Hilton Friday was crooner Vic Damone and Blackhawk Bobby Orr." That sort of thing.

 

In 1963, a few days after JFK was shot, his daughter Karyn "Cookie" Kupcinet died in Los Angeles. Cookie was an aspiring actress with a few credits--her last was a Perry Mason episode--but also with a drug problem. Was it murder, accident, suicide? Was it somehow tied in to the Kennedy assassination? (Almost certainly not, though conspiracy addicts were sure it was.) The case is open even now. Her hyoid bone was cracked, suggesting strangulation, but there's evidence the autopsy was botched. That's all historical fact and it's a good setup.

 

The book is billed as a novel, and Orner tells the story obliquely. Babs and Lou Rosenthal are friends of the Kupcinets--Babs and Essee Kupcinet had both aspired to be dancers and took classes together--and it's their grandson Jedediah Rosenthal, a not terribly successful author and single parent living in Chicago, who is telling the story. It offers a plausible (but not provable) solution to the death of Karyn Kupcinet about halfway through the novel, but that not Orner's real target. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the friendship between the Kupcinets and the Rosenthals falls apart. Why? 

"A friendship ended. In November of 1963, seven years before I was born, a friendship between two couples severed."

Rosenthal's sister jokes in the book to Rosenthal, so how's your auto-fiction going, and I believe, while it says 'Novel' on that matchbook on the cover, it owes a fair amount to Orner's family history. He wrote an earlier novel Love and Shame and Love that covers the same three generations of a Jewish Chicago-area family, with a different last name, but the same family structure.

 

Chicago's my home town, and I sometimes read novels just because they're set there. Chicago's a fairly easy city for such a project, though not as easy as London or Paris, of course. I get curious how they do it. Osler and Orner have fairly different styles. Both men have lived in Chicago but don't currently. Orner grew up in the Chicago suburbs; I'm not sure about Osler.

 

Osler uses fairly well-known landmarks in the city. Theodore Prescott lives on Prairie Avenue and either in visiting him or Prescott's neighbor, Harriet Monroe goes there often. As you can see Prairie Avenue has a Wikipedia article and was once known as Millionaire's Row. People with brand-name names like Pullman, Field, or Armour once lived there, and a couple of years ago I visited one of the mansions myself, now a museum, though when I was a kid the street was considered a no-go zone, and if you drove down it you didn't get out of your car: you were likely to see impoverished Black men warming themselves at fires in barrels. He similarly uses downtown office buildings or the University of Chicago Settlement House.

 

Orner has a different, but curious strategy for locations that works in Chicago, though maybe not elsewhere. He gives an actual address. For example: 1739 W. Jarvis or 711 W. Pratt, Apt. 5D. Often the locations don't actually exist--711 W. Pratt would be in the lake, though not by much--and I can picture the places he specifies. I know exactly the sort of building that would be near the lake at the end of Pratt, and I would be pretty knowledgeable about the socio-economic class of a person living there. (Well-made brick apartment buildings of three stories, a little worn, in better shape now than they were forty years ago. Some of them will have been turned into condos. You could live there cheaply in the 80s. Living there now would cost more.) You can use Google streetview to get a sense of the neighborhood if you don't just happen to know it. But how would it feel if you weren't from Chicago? I'm less certain.

 

Anyway, there could be more said, but this post is long enough, and it's been sitting in my draft folder for a while. Do you particularly enjoy novels set in your hometown or where you live? Double-check them for accuracy? 😉

 
 

How To Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors (#poem)

How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors

It's not rocket surgery.

First, get all your ducks on the same page.

After all, you can't make an omelette

without breaking stride.

 

Be sure to watch what you write

with a fine-tuned comb.

Check and re-check until the cows turn blue.

It's as easy as falling off a cake.

 

Don't worry about opening up

a whole hill of beans:

you can burn that bridge when you come to it,

if you follow where I'm coming from.

 

Concentrate! Keep your door closed

and your enemies closer.

Finally, don't take the moral high horse:

if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it.

 

-Brian Bilston

 

I just came across this as 3 Quarks Daily, a cultural aggregator site, which among other things does a new poem daily. It definitely caught my eye, or ear, or something.

 

Brian Bilston is a pseudonym for Paul Millicheap, a British poet with several books out, but who generally releases his new poetry at that place formerly known as Twitter. As the photo suggests he prefers his privacy. Totally new to me, but I'll be keeping my eye out for more.

 

Is it really that easy to fall off a cake? Sounds difficult to me... 😉 

Ed McBain's The Con Man

"Meanwhile back at the morgue..."

The first chapter introduces two cases: Arthur Brown and Bert Kling interview a young black woman working as a maid who's been conned out of five dollars by a pretend preacher, and Steve Carella is called in where a dead body of a woman is found floating by the docks.

 

Brown is determined to find the con man; Carella first has to determine if what he's looking at is a crime, but it is. His floater didn't drown, but went into the water already dead from arsenic poisoning. ("Back at the morgue...")

 

Then a second woman is found floating in the harbor, also dead from arsenic poisoning. Both women have tattoos on their hand.

 

This is the fourth of McBain's series of 87th Precinct novels. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it was a particularly strong entry in the series. McBain can occasionally be didactic about police methods--he does famously precede his novels with:

 

"The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique."

In this one, we learned how fingerprints are taken from dead bodies, which was grisly, and maybe interesting? At least relevant to the plot. But there was too much about how con men do their thing, which didn't have much to do with our particular con men. But the final chase was certainly thrilling enough...

 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

 

Golden Age (1957). Policeman.

 

I suppose that's Steve Carella on the cover in plainclothes, and Fred di Angelo, the beat cop to whom the body was first reported behind him.

 

So Adam's offspring live...

 

from Vis and Ramin 

So Adam's offspring live, and put away

The happiness and grief of yesterday.

Why should you grieve for what's gone by? Forget!

Why brood on things that haven't happened yet?

Grief won't bring back the past, and all your scolding

Will not prevent the future from unfolding.

Enjoy a hundred years of victory

But one day's all your lifetime here will be ;

Whatever riches you might hope to win

One day alone is yours--the day you're in;

The best course is to look for pleasure, to

Enjoy the single day that's given you. [p. 264]

 

-Fakraddin Gorgani (tr. Dick Davis)

 

Sections in Vis and Ramin often ended in a bit of general wisdom, with applicability (possibly ironic) to what just happened. Just before this is in the story line Vis and King Mobad had been reconciled, and Mobad had given a stack of gifts to both Vis and her nurse. It wasn't to last, of course, and we knew it wouldn't even before what I quoted. "The moon-faced beauty lied, Mobad believed her/And asked her to forgive him that he'd grieved her."

 

I had copied out some other sections as I was reading but they didn't fit in my earlier post. But now, here I am thinking about Iran again... 

Peter Dickinson's The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest

     "We've got a lovely little set-up here, all airy-fairy. Just the thing for Pibble, I said, the moment I'd seen the Kus."

    "Coos?"

    "Every single member of the household, my dear, is called Ku. They're a tribe from New Guinea, somewhere. Deceased's a Ku, suspects all Kus, witnesses all Kus. Except there aren't any."

 

This was totally bats. But I really mean that in the best possible way...

 

During World War II, the Ku tribe sheltered a downed Australian airman. The Japanese found out and killed everyone they could lay their hands on, and this included the British anthropologist studying the tribe. The anthropologist's daughter Elizabeth has brought the remains of the tribe to London, where they live in a house, attempting to keep up their tribal customs in an alien environment. They all take the last name Ku.

 

Then the chief of the tribe, Aaron Ku, is bashed over the head by a lefty at the top of the stairs.

 

Elizabeth has gotten her own Ph.D. in anthropology after the war, and this arrangement will enable her to keep up her father's work more comfortably, with the tribe arranged for viewing like ants tunnelling in a kid's glass terrarium. And one of the things she tells Pibble is that, while the Kus don't approve of murder, of course, if they were to murder someone, they would naturally use the left hand, because that's the hand of evil deeds.

 

Most of the clues kind of go like that. This is the first case (out of six) with Chief Inspector Jimmy Pibble by Dickinson, but in his world he's already got a reputation. We're told he's the one who gets these kind of cases. He interviews an old lag at one point:

    "Hope you don't mind me asking, but are you Pibble?"

    "Yes," said Pibble. "But how did you know?"

    "Kinky little case like vis. Vey wouldn't send one of the ver big boys out on it--too much to lose, nuffing to gain. Good luck, ven."

There is a lot of slang and dialect. Pibble himself uses "Crippen" as an oath amusingly enough, but a fair amount of it might be easier for a Brit...

A second murder is in progress when it's thwarted by Pibble discovering the culprit.

Pretty entertaining. I'd read another from the series. Do you know it? Is this representative? 

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1968). Staircase.