You want I should feed him some lead?
Crooked: A Crime Novel
by Dietrich Kalteis
Toronto: ECW Press, 2024
$22.95 / 9781770417076
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
*
Crooked takes us inside the world of a pair of young hoodlums who choose the wrong side of the law for fun, fame and profit. They’re likeable hoods at times, anti-heroes of a sort, even qualifying as public entertainment… that is, if they don’t rob your bank or kidnap your rich uncle.
Alvin “Old Creepy” Karpis and five-foot Fred Barker are the lead characters in this novel from author Dietrich Kalteis and he had me hooked on their story like a cop pinned against the wall or a bank manager locked in his empty safe.
We travel on the running board of a getaway stolen car, chow down on Kate “Ma” Barker’s fried chicken, witness Kama Sutra love in the back seat, and a shorter life in the fast lane. We even do the odd dance with the kind of “dame” that would be attracted to a life of crime. In short, we are ushered into a fictional world of real-life events that is grippingly good reading.
Wow! Slow down. What exactly have we got here? The days of bathtub gin, speakeasys and Tommy gun stickups were symbols of yesteryear, right? Long forgotten. The Prohibition gangster era is long buried in a blaze of bullets from the government-issue guns of J. Edgar’s G Men. So what is Kalteis doing here?
Kalteis, author of 11 novels, in including 2023’s The Get, is having a ball doing “what I love,” as he shares the pleasure for 300+ pages by ably laying out the Karpis memoir on a beautifully written and creatively constructed canvas stretching from St. Paul, Minnesota to Chicago with detours to Havana, Cuba, New Orleans and a half-dozen one-horse towns in-between. The result is infectious.
In each new location, Vancouver resident Kalteis puts as smack dab into the hard-drinking, easy-living 1930s. From the first chapter, we are transported to the scene of bank robberies, beer barons’ kidnappings, and dustups with Al Capone’s enforcer Frank Nitti.
Our vantage point: the front seat of a big Buick or a flathead Ford V8 or the back booth of a bar called the Green Lantern frequented by crooks, crooked cops and politicians, and their damsels. Two of them, Dot, Alvin’s wife, and Lolli (for Dolores), his 17-year-old girlfriend, give as good as they get and they can talk as tough as the bad boys.
From this view, we hear Alvin, a.k.a. Ray, tell his story using clipped sentences and gangster-tongue constructions, in the vein of “You want I should feed him some lead?” We are listening in from a bar table on the Costa Del Sol, Spain, as Alvin recounts his exploits to a pair of tourists. Thus readers rush to catch up on whatever happened to the Karpis-Barker gang.
The stops along this cluttered roadmap of break-ins, bloody shootouts and dirt-floor hideouts from Chi-town for Chicago, H-town for Havana, Monopoly City for Atlantic City, and Lowertown for St Paul’s, where the authorities look the other way in return for a slice of the pie.
Kalteis is having a great time letting us relive this romantic period of early twentieth century history and he’s doing it without laundering the bad bits. We see Alvin, Fred and their accomplices murder people, frighten citizens out of their wits, and trade stories about their ill-gotten gains as they compete for public attention with Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde Barrow, and John “Jackrabbit” Dillinger.
Kalteis has plucked these two and their entourage of killers from the pages of a sordid history that still titillates the public imagination. And he shows that he’s done his research, naming other less-notorious lawbreakers that appeared in the front-page newspapers of the day. George “Shotgun” Zeigler, Ice Pick Willie, Basil the Owl, Two-Gun Crowley, Billy the Killer, and Terrible Ted. They all figure in Alvin’s retelling of his and the Barker brothers back-alley and Main Street adventures.
Are they the good guys? Hardly. They are greedy for fame and money. They try for an image as Robin Hoods but are really just hoods unwilling to make a straight living. Not that their prison records would get them a day job, marriage to a “nice” girl, and a couple of newborn babies.
They’ve made a different life choice from the time their parents gave up on them as delinquents and signed them over to Juvenile Hall. But there are moments when we are transported to a time when the public saw them as heroes of a sort. Bad guys, yes, but there is a sporting side to their exploits, a playful side that the public wants to cheer on.
Kalteis employs exotic jailhouse names and phrases that make for a rapid-fire reading experience. An example? “McCanless tells him he better lay the broom down and go strap on an iron, that is if he wanted a chance to show he wasn’t just a stack of taradiddles.” That one sent me straight to my Oxford English to learn that taradiddles are petty lies and “pretentious nonsense.”
He also provides vivid action shots: “Middle of the street, Larry De Vol held his Tommy gun, standing before a shot-up police car, steam hissing from its radiator, its windshield blown out, tires flattened, two officers face down in the street.” We are on the sidewalk, scared silly.
As Alvin finishes telling his story to the young couple in Spain, he explains that he wanted to kill J. Edgar, have him atone for the slaughter of his old friends Fred, Doc, and Ma Barker. He doesn’t get the chance and has spent 26 years on the Rock—Alcatraz—for his sins. He’s too old for Tommy guns and sizzling dynamite, he realizes. He has been “released into times he no longer fits into.”
There isn’t a lot to connect this story to Canada other than its prohibition-era role in supplying the Mob with booze and the odd reference to Alvin’s Quebec birthplace. Still, this is a universally well-known tale. Movies like Scarface and TV series like The Untouchables partly owe their success to Alvin and the gang. He was, after all, the last crook standing when Hoover arrested him in New Orleans in 1936, ending a five-year run of theft, murder, and letting the good times roll.
*
Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. He has recently reviewed books by Grant Lawrence, Howard White, Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Vince R. Ditrich, Aaron Williams, Michel Drouin, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw (Brett D. Huson), Haley Healey, and Keith G. Powell for BCR.
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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