Chicago crime
An old murder haunts cops in the novel “Start Shooting.”
What is it about Chicago that within less than a year we get two thrillers in which bad people threaten to spread weaponized viral material into the general population? Well, it’s only a little more than half a year since I read that first thriller about a bio-weapon threat to Chicago — “We All Fall Down” by Michael Harvey, which came out last summer — so I was thrilled to find that at the heart of “Start Shooting,” Charlie Newton’s blazing new Chicago police procedural, something similar was going on. Just kidding. Because there, all similarities with other Chicago police novels and most American crime novels end.
In “Start Shooting,” Newton has given us a frenzied, frenetic, driving, punching, shouting, pinwheel of revelations about life in the wrong lane. I don’t think that Newton got the memo that only New York and Los Angeles merit crime fiction about cities and their police forces that races along so fast and furiously that fast and furious seem like a slow-motion concept. I mean like, if you overhear a conversation about this novel while on public transportation, it’s going to sound like, hey, I’m reading this novel about crime, police corruption, civic disorder, neighborhoods, gangs, and the life of Midwest theater, Japanese World-war II madness and deep, long-living, nearly everlasting love, all set in Chicago? And it’s like? It’s like, whew! Some old wounds lie at the heart of the book — the rape and murder of a young Catholic schoolgirl, the execution of the young black gang member who committed the crime and, oh yeah, some desperate experiments by the military government of Japan to poison its way to victory in WW II — and some present crimes that make for new wounds, such as the gangland execution of an undercover female CIA operative set up by someone in the Chicago police force, deadly shootouts among bad cops, armed civilians and Korean gangsters, false accusations of sexual molestations of minors, female and male, and a plot by some dirty cops to clean up from a bio-warfare threat to the city fathers.
Newton opens with a jazzy-bluesy paean to Chicago’s South Side by a policeman named Bobby Vargas that reads like a cross between Saul Bellow’s opening of “The Adventures of Augie March” and the old New York radio crime show “Naked City.” It’s a 10-page prose poem that makes clear the reader is in good hands, even as you want to fingerprint those hands because of the mix of dirt and the divine that the cop heaps up on the city.
Vargas and his older brother Ruben, a fellow officer, stand at the center of the story, along with Arleen Brennan, an actress and the twin sister of the long-ago murdered schoolgirl, who was, and remains, the love of Bobby’s life. When the city’s big (failing) daily newspaper — the Herald — begins an exposé-linking Bobby Vargas to that ancient murder, events pick up speed. Or meth, one might say. The book reads like a wild (Mid) western, with cops rushing along in marked cars and on foot, shooting at gangsters and each other, over the course of a weekend that packs in enough flying bullets, bodies, lies, truths, heroes and villains to last most urban areas a year. Along the way we get some tutorials in police work that may prove useful to some readers, such as, among other observations, Bobby Vargas’ aside about an openair drug market on a Friday afternoon that “No visible gunmen doesn’t mean they aren’t aiming at you.” Or that this corner’s criminals could have their guns “hidden in loose building bricks, or trash, or the wheel wells of parked cars.... Open-air drug markets have systems, all variations on the same theme: profit and survival....”
Bobby’s trying to clear his name, Arleen’s trying to get a major part in the city’s big theatrical production of “A street car Named Desire,” Ruben Vargas wants to make a profit off of some very bad stuff — the book whirls along with these powerful engines driving it. Sometimes I wanted to put down the book and shout, whoa, whoa! Slow down just a little, please. But I couldn’t put it down.