Like a Punch in the Gut

The Yankee Club (Jake & Laura Mystery Book 1) by Michael Murphy.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

We wrap up Noir November with a hardboiled detective drama set against the background of the Great Depression. Michael Murphy’s The Yankee Club is the epitome of noir.

Novelist and former shamus Jake Donovan (not to be confused with Showtime’s Ray Donovan) skipped town when his childhood sweetheart and the love of his life, Broadway Star Laura Wilson, rejected his umpteenth proposal to get hitched. But after two years in Florida, he’s back in New York City and reconnecting with old friends. They’re a rogues' gallery of 1930’s archetypes. There's Mickey O’Brien, Donovan’s hard-drinking former partner, now flying solo in the private eye business; Danny, the bouncer at the Yankee Club speakeasy, who can’t get over that Donovan stole his bike when they were kids; Gino, Danny’s boss, a tough as nails Italian-American who doesn’t take guff from anyone—except his mother. Then there’s Laura herself, whose first appearance is described in true Raymond Chandler-style: “A woman stood in the doorway, her face hidden in the shadows…her white chiffon dress was backlit by the bright lights above the nurse’s station. I recognized her long shapely legs even before her face came into focus.” (Sadly, these Chandleresque passages get fewer and farther between as the novel progresses).

Alas, some of these reunions play out like a punch in the gut. Laura is engaged now, to one Spencer Dalrymple the Third. “You know, the Long Island Dalrymples.” Donovan is floored. “The Laura I knew used to make fun of stuffed shirts like Dalrymple.” As for Mickey, he and Donovan step out for some air and Mickey is promptly gunned down. His dying words are a cryptic plea, “The key…it’s…in the ashtray.”

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it, and that’s what Donovan does. He owes it to Mickey. He finds the key in the ashtray. It leads him to a bus station storage locker with a bunch of newspaper clippings inside. Some of the articles are about Giuseppe Zangara, the real-life bricklayer who had recently been executed following his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate then-president-elect Franklin Roosevelt (Zangara will be familiar to fans of Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. In that alternate history, Zangara succeeds at killing Roosevelt, the point of divergence which sets in motion a chain of events that lead to an Axis victory in World War II). But Zangara is not the only subject of the news reports in Mickey’s stash. Another article concerns a cabal of anti-New Deal bankers known as the Golden Legion, led by, of all people, Spencer Dalrymple the Third.

Were Dalrymple and the Golden Legion somehow connected to the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Franklin Roosevelt—and the successful one on Mickey O’Brien? Donovan soon finds himself enmeshed in a sinister conspiracy with America itself as the stakes. Along the way he encounters Nazi diplomats, fascist thugs, a hooker with a heart of gold, corrupt cops who want to pin the murder on him, and scores of Depression-era celebrities. The cameos reminded me of a similar device in Brad Linaweaver and J. Kent Hastings’s Anarquía, albeit the celebrities in Murphy’s love letter to the New Deal tend to lean farther left politically than those in Linaweaver and Hastings’s libertarian utopia. They include Dashiell Hammett, Ethel Merman, Babe Ruth, and Joseph Kennedy (who’s been whitewashed of his real-life anti-Semitic and pro-fascist sympathies). Donovan is on the spot when Lillian Hellman realizes The Children’s Hour would be a far more interesting play with same-sex protagonists; he’s also there when someone tells Cole Porter, “In the old days, just a glimpse of stocking was, you know, shocking.”

No doubt about it, The Yankee Club is fun. Well-researched too. I knew about the Depression-era shantytowns called Hoovervilles from my high school American history class. I didn’t know until I read The Yankee Club that there was one in Central Park.

As a mystery, however, The Yankee Club leaves something to be desired. The villains’ plot was ridiculous; there was no way it could possibly work. Also, it wasn’t hard to figure out the identity of the mastermind behind it: there was only one suspect. Further, Donovan wasn’t all that instrumental in uncovering it. It turns out there was a secret service agent, Landon Stoddard, who had been working with Mickey before Donovan arrived on the scene. Although Donovan uncovered a few key details, much of his work went into uncovering things Stoddard already knew. Donovan could have stayed in Florida, washing his fedora, and Stoddard would have gotten along fine.

At some point, I’ll probably check out the sequels to the Yankee Club: All That Glitters, Wings in the Dark, and The Big Brush-off. I do like the characters and the overall atmospherics. Combined with the right storyline, the Jake and Laura series would really have something.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Amazon