‘Bullets for Dead Hoods' salvages encyclopedia of 1930s mobsters
When I first received word of the project that would prove a balm to my worried spirit, I thought it was 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 from the 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 I was intrigued, but I was 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 manuscript by an unknown author describing in personal and specific detail, the 1930 1/4 u2032s criminal element of Chicago, starting with Tony Accardoand 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.
Sobserscove 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-inch-by-12-inch format, which allows for full-sized renderings of the original manuscript pages, Sobserscove has supplemented the text with a fold out map of all the locations mentioned in the biographical sketches.
The result is a combination of history, puzzle, narrative and work of art, and every time I’ve picked it up since its arrival, I find a grin on my face.
As a primary text of mob history, it must be invaluable to historians and scholars, but Sobserscove 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 going-out-of-business sale; and Sobsercove 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?
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin DiAngelo
2. “Winter of Our Discontent” by John Steinbeck
3. “The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz” by Erik Larson
4. “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo
5. “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” by Lawrence Wright
— Joe S., Downers Grove
“The Book of Aron” by Jim Shepard is a powerful reading experience. The horror of what’s happening in his Nazi-era Warsaw ghetto dawns on a young boy.
1. “Neon Prey” by John Sandford
2. “The Heap” by Sean Adams
3. “The Last Monument” by Michael C. Grumley
4. “The Flight Attendant” by Chris Bohjalian
5. “Shut Up and Listen!: Hard Business Truths that Will Help You Succeed” by Tilman Fertitta
— David S., Lake Zurich
I think John Scalzi’s “Lock In” has the right mix of high concept and mystery that David seems to seek.
1. “How Much of These Hills is Gold” by C. Pam Zhang
2. “The Overstory” by Richard Powers
3. “Simon the Fiddler” by Paulette Jiles
4. “Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors” by Alison Light
5. “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles
— Marty B., Alpharetta, Georgia
Marty tells me that he normally reads more nonfiction and history, but is recently oriented toward fiction, so I’m going to keep feeding that impulse with Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys.”
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read to books@chicagotribune.com.
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