The crime bosses of Nebraska
Midwestern noir disappoints
Little Underworld” opens dramatically enough, as brothers Jim and Ward Beely drown Vern Meyer, who assaulted Jim’s underage daughter. A former policeman, Jim is now a private eye who reluctantly partners with Frank Tvrdik, a dicey cop who tells him he’ll keep the Meyer murder hush-hush if Jim helps him prevent politician Elmer Kobb from winning the vote for Omaha commissioner and taking over the city’s liquor business, super-lucrative in those Prohibition days.
All too soon, the book swells with characters and plot-lines spanning Beely family members, goniffs at City Hall and in the death business of funeral homes and mortuaries, as well as descriptions of Omaha that may, just may, tantalize you to check it out.
The city is painted as corrupt, a condition and state of mind that writer Chris Harding Thornton should have explored in greater depth.
The city comes off seedy rather than dangerous, despite paragraphs like this: “Bombings were not uncommon. There’d been a few in the aughts and teens. What was uncommon was anybody getting pinched for one. Bombings generally worked the same way ‘homicide: no suspects’ cases did. If somebody wanted to blame unions or anarchists, with the bonus of, say, inflating the cost of a county courthouse by half a million dollars, bombings were too useful to solve.”
One might expect Harding Thornton to pursue that bombing thread, punctuating her intertwining, insufficiently fleshed-out stories of broken families and a tainted city with an explosion or two. Instead, she lards — and hobbles — her narrative with too many characters, too much dialogue, and insufficient scene-setting. Naming streets is not the same as building atmosphere.
A hard read
It took me a long time to read “Little Underworld.” I could absorb it only in fits of attention. Despite the occasional crackle of Harding Thornton’s prose, her second book rarely compelled me to turn the pages.
I was interested in it largely because of its locale. Omaha, Neb., is not a common setting, especially for what was said to be a noir thriller set in 1930. I wanted to see how Harding Thornton, a seventh-generation Nebraskan, would make Omaha — to me, mostly associated with steak — exotic. She fell short.
I don’t mean to be harsh, and far be it from me to tell a fiction writer how to write. Harding Thornton can write, and evoke an era.
Here, the malleable cop Tvrdik steers some friends and associates to Carl Ziske’s, one of Omaha’s rare soft drink parlors that isn’t a front for hooch: “Pop got a malted milk, chocolate, and told Carl he enjoyed it. Carl talked so excited about the versatility of chocolate milk, he could have been on malted milk’s payroll. He said you could add vanilla, almond, peppermint — even clove.”
The takeaway, the promise, of the novel is in the character of Jim Beely, barely hanging on during the Depression, prone to nips of booze and morphine, tormented by his decision to murder Meyer.
“All his life, people asked Jim what he was,” the author muses. “What kind of a name was Beely. As if a name said anything about what a person was. But people didn’t like it, when they couldn’t peg you easy. And Jim was guilty of doing the same goddamned thing.”
Beely is an interesting player, a figure Harding Thornton should develop. His is the stuff that keeps a reader interested. Maybe next time.