Jeff,
Re your message below:
> Right now I'm reading my first McGivern novel,
The
> Big Heat, which to my
> surprise, is set in Philadelphia. I'd never
read
> anything outside of Goodis
> set in Philly. Since I lived ten years there I
know
> the lay of the land, so
> I can follow Bannion in my head as he drives
all
> over the city.
Two other McGivern cop novels, SHIELD FOR MURDER and ROGUE
COP, are also set in Philly, where McGivern was a police
reporter for some years. Both feature crooked cops. MURDER is
about a bad cop who gets worse. COP is about a detective on
the mob's payroll who goes straight when his rookie patrolman
kid brother is killed by his boss. Both good books. Like
HEAT, they both were filmed, SHIELD FOR MURDER with Edmund
O'Brien and ROGUE COP with Robert Taylor.
THE BIG HEAT was partially based on a real incident. A
Philadelphia city official, finding he could no longer
justify his corruption to himself, killed himself after
making a written confession detailing the many connections
between city government and the Mob. The written record
actually found its way to the editorial offices of several
Philly newspapers who were afraid to print the story.
Interestingly, though the film versions of those three
McGivern novels were pretty faithful, none of them was set in
Philly. THE BIG HEAT was set in a nondescript
"Big Eastern City." I think they might have called it
"Pittsfield" or something similar. SHIELD FOR MURDER was
apparently set in Los Angeles. I think ROGUE COP was,
too.
Another Philly-set crime series is Bart Spicer's under-rated
novels about PI Carney Wilde. He's a Marlowe-style op when
the series gets started, but, like a lot young businessmen in
the '50's, he's got the success bug. By the last book in the
series, he's built his one-man outfit into one of Philly's
biggest security/detective agencies. The first book is called
THE DARK LIGHT. A very well-done and unjustly forgotten
series.
W.E.B. Griffin's BADGE OF HONOR series of police procedurals
is also set in Philadelphia. These are each generally about
100 pages fatter than they have to be, and they read more
like the military novels Griffin's better-known for than like
cop novels, but I actually like them quite a bit.
JIM DOHERTY
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 02 Dec 2004 EST