Robert Campbell (1)

This is an absolutely terrific book that should have wide appeal to many mystery readers. Campbell has taken many classic Hardboiled detective themes and managed to wrap them in an entirely new package and, in doing so, he has created a detective novel entirely unlike anything else out there. Here he has the dogged investigator working on his own with all of the bureaucrats and the mobsters warning him off. He has a story about corruption and girls who come to the big city expecting to make show more a new life only to end up in the morgue because that ended up being the most convenient way to shut them up. This essence of this tale can be found in dozens of fifties paperbacks.

What makes the Jimmy Flannery stories unique are that Flannery is narrated in perfect cadence capturing his Irish Chicagoan persona. Flannery is a precinct captain in the old patronage system of Chicago where votes were bought by doing favors like greasing the wheels so a fireman who drove his car into the lake after having a few too many thirty days short of earning a full pension at thirty years can rest in peace knowing his widow is taken care of. Favor for favor, markers being offered, this is Flannery's world, a world starting to change with the old neighborhoods changing.
But what happens when a bomb goes off at a clinic and a young girl and an old woman dies in his precinct and everywhere Flannery turns someone is trying to squealch the investigation and Flannery may be like a junkyard dog once he gets his teeth into something, but at a certain point can he fight the entire power structure of Chicago.

But it's not just the Davey and Goliath one man against corruption and evil story that makes this book. It's all the neighborhoods and the bars and the hangouts and all the people in this neighborhoods from all these different backgrounds that Campbell brings to life. Campbell took a large risk having part of the plot revolve around the bombing of an abortion clinic, but he managed to humanize people involved on all sides of the issue. At bottom, this book is simply a top notch mystery and stands with the best of them for its well crafted plot and for a writing style that just pulls you right in. show less

The 600-pound Gorilla is the second book out of Campbell’s eleven- book Jimmy Flannery series. These books tell the story of the end of old-style machine politics in Chicago and the growing pains that the city experiences as it changes and meets modernity.
For Flannery, Chicago is all about being a party worker who serves his community by doing favor for favor. Others more entrenched see favor for favor as something less benign but more entwining. It’s a system whereby they are all show more entwined and all beholden to one another. Each Flannery book involves a murder and its usually a murder that someone wants to sweep under the rug because it is more convenient or someone owes someone a favor or something of the like.

Here, the changing of the guard is represented by the Alderman’s seat for the 27th and Flannery’s sponsor, Chips Delvin, is looking more like an old elephant who can’t keep up with the changing ethnic face of the ward. The new face of the ward just might be Janet Canarias, who is not someone the old guard is comfortable with, what with her being lesbian. Deals are going to have to be made to keep her from getting the alderman’s seat. Maybe, even Flannery is going to be set up to take the seat.

Against this backdrop of politics and the changing nature of this part of Chicago is the murder that Flannery feels like he has to solve – even if no one else wants to. Baby, the city’s prized Gorilla, has to find temporary housing during a blizzard when the city zoo’s steam plant is on the fritz.

A gay bathhouse seems like the perfect solution for a tropical beast like a gorilla or, at least, it is until the next morning when the gorilla is marked up with a chain and two dead bodies are found with her. The two corpses were guests in Flannery’s ward even if no one else cares to figure it out. He feels a responsibility to figure this out and not let it get swept under the rug. He is like a junkyard dog in that respect – once he gets his teeth in something, he won’t let go.

The book is written as if narrated by Flannery and Campbell gets the attitude down flat. Flannery’s voice and diction are heard clear above anything else. The book is written well and reads quite smoothly. It is unnecessary to read the first book in the series to dive into this one, although sometimes the background will help if nothing else but to know who all the shady characters are. show less

One of the great things about the Jimmy Flannery series is how
Flannery narrates the stories in a down-home, folksy vernacular. The
stories harken back to a time when we lived in actual neighborhoods
and knew each other. Flannery works in the Chicago sewers but he is
better known around town for doing favors Chicago-style as a cog in
the old machine politics of a different era.

In this eighth novel in the series, there are no 600 pound gorillas, no
alligators, and no crazy goats. Flannery show more has grown up a little. He now
has a wife and a baby on the way. And he needs to get used to now
having Chips Delvin's job as the warlord of the 27th.

Not a traditional mystery by any means. And none of that shoot em
up, chase em down action. There's a mystery to be sure and Flannery
figures it out by poking his nose where it don't belong and having
conversations with folks. The magic of the storytelling here is not so
much in narrating action scenes as it is establishing a certain world of
neighborhoods and people doing favors. show less

Alice in La-La Land,the second of Robert Campbell's Whistler novels, is noir which is at once of its time--the late eighties--and outside of time altogether.

While having breakfast, watching the street show outside of his favorite greasy spoon, Gentry's, and talking literature (Alice in Wonderland) and philosophy (the sound of one hand clapping) with one-armed counterman Bosco Silverlake, P.I. Whistler is approached by your classic noirish dame: both classy and brassy, blond, with a skirt show more slit up to there and furs slung over her shoulder. She's Nell Twelvetrees and she wants a bodyguard. Whistler's been recommended, you see. And why does this leggy angel need a bodyguard? Nell thinks her husband, late night TV host Roger Twelvetrees, is going to have her killed because she's divorcing him.

Twelvetrees is for sure a psychopath and a sadist, as Whistler soon discovers. But is the sweet Nell really as sweet as she'd have him believe? Or is she yet another hustler with a beautiful facade, like so many others in La-La Land? And who is the mysterious man who keeps turning up, with Twelvetrees' daughter, at the scene of the crime, even in Nell's bedroom?

The mystery is twisty and intricate, full of girls who are really boys who want to keep their boy parts and girls who are really boys who want to lose their boy parts and boys who are really girls...well, let's just say that identity is a flexible thing in La-La Land and that that makes the mystery's solution even more delicious--and disturbing--when it comes.

Also delicious is Robert Campbell's language, which is lyrical and street and--I think--in some cases made up. There are twangie boys and gazoonies and gonifs, and even though I've never heard any of these words before, each is perfect. As are most of the words in the book.

Read Alice in La-La Land. You will be enchanted, you will be disgusted, and you will most certainly feel as if you've fallen down the rabbit hole. show less