‘Bullets’ salvages 1930s mobster encyclopedia
When I first received word of the project thatwould prove a balm tomy worried spirit, I thought itwas a put-on. The email from Julia Klein of Chicago’s Soberscove Press was introducing me to “Bullets for Dead Hoods: An Encyclopedia of Chicago Mobsters, c. 1933.” It promised a “facsimile” of a “mysterious manuscript that intimately documents the Chicago Outfit through 140 real-life characters that range fromthe infamous (Capone, Torrio, the Everleigh Sisters) to the mob’s lesser known lieutenants, accomplices, and racketeers.”
The book’s author was anonymous, the manuscript discovered by Chicago gallery owner and writer John Corbett at a junk shop’s going-out-of business sale.
It’s a great pitch, and Iwas intrigued, but Iwas also fairly certain that I was dealing with a clever play on postmodern tropes of authorship and authenticity, a fictional construction glossed with the imprimatur of history and fact.
Nope. It really is a large-format book of typewritten pages from a man uscript by an unknown author describing in personal and specific detail, the 1930s criminal element of Chicago, starting with Tony Accardo and ending with Jack Zuta.
All the famous names are indeed represented, but so too are many that do not merit a Wikipedia entry, such as “Chicago Annie Gleason,” a “lovely old woman … but still looking the part of a Lake Shore Drive dowager in her furs. There isn’t a diamond brooch safe within grasping distance when Annie enters a shop.”
Annie has “lifted pearls in London, stolen fur coats in Berlin, blown safes in Baltimore, and lived high when the money was coming in.”
Those little excerpts give some sense of the anonymous author’s style, which allows you to imagine the glint in his (or her) eye as he or she sat at the manual typewriter, crafting the entrees, some as short as a paragraph, others extending over several pages.
Soberscove focuses on books about art and culture, and I’m here to tell you, the presentation of “Bullets for Dead Hoods” is gorgeous— a coffee-table book that you’ll also compulsively read. Rendered in a 9-by-by12-inch format,, which allows for full-sized renderings of the original manuscript pages, Soberscove has supplemented the text with a foldout map of all the locations mentioned in the biographical sketches.
The result is a combination of history, puzzle, narrative andwork of art, and every time I’ve picked it up since its arrival, I find a grin onmy face.
As a primary text of mob history, it must be invaluable to historians and scholars, but Soberscove has made it accessible, and literally fun for everyone. It’d be a great gift for any Chicago buff.
Think about the confluence of people it took to see this thing through to today: the original author; the secondhand shop owner who purchased it at an estate sale; Corbett, who rescued it from the goingout-of-business sale; and Soberscove publisher Julia Klein, who saw something beautiful in it. Sounds like fate.
There’s no rational reason this book should exist, and yet here it is.
How great is that?