Re: Cooking (was Re: RARA-AVIS: Murderer's Row - Short story collection)

From: JIM DOHERTY ( jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 26 Jul 2001


Re Bill Denton's comment:

> Surely there are no truly hardboiled stories that
> dwell on cooking, beyond
> quick meals at diners and sumptuous feasts laid on
> by corrupt city bosses.
> Haven't people here made an inverse relationship
> between Spenser's
> toughness and his cooking?

Max Allan Collins's *Bullet Proof*, the third in his series of novels fictionalizing Eliot Ness's adventures as Cleveland's police chief, has Ness trying to stop the Mob's plan to take over the food industry in Ohio. One of the character's is a famous restauranter (a fictional composite of two real-life figures) who is a victim of the Mob's extortion attempts.

Lots of real-life mobsters (and a quite a few fictional ones, as well) have owned and operated restuarants as fronts for their illegal activities. In the 1954 theatrical film version of *Dragnet*, Max Troy, the Mafia guy that Friday and his partner are trying to nail, owns a place called the Red Spot Grill. Presumably his real-life counterpart owned a similar place.

JIM DOHERTY

JIM DOHERTY

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