A book a day: Shane Stevens: Ghost Town

It’s been a while since I read a Sakhalin. And although, personally and literary-wise, I am not a staunch follower of what is called, depending on, black gendero o novel crimesl, we must acknowledge the Barcelona publishing house’s enormous success in recovering forgotten authors, which, I admit, makes one put one’s hands on one’s head and think: how has this been ignored?

Or how visible the influence is! In a certain sense, we could say that it is a very reliable publisher and, although this literary segment may be prone to a certain hyperbole or even inbreeding (authors who were journalists or researchers or even convicts, wow), their synopses, text extracts, and retrospective comments on their books that appear in their copies are usually precise and representative. It is a question of coherence that gives them a well-deserved credibility.

Of Dead city, The work of Shane Stevens – a deceased American novelist of no repercussion – is said to be “It could have been a preliminary draft of The Sopranos”. And that is saying something. In fact, the anonymous bully on the cover, in a cocky pose and with a bovine look, could pass for one of the extras from the emblematic series, sitting in front of a list of delicatessen culinary that could pass for Satriale’s.

That is, all the packaging It is perfect and consistent with the publisher and the novel. Dead city In its four hundred and fifty pages, it defines the criminal underworld of New Jersey, with the comings and goings of small-time criminals, with its faithful description of the hierarchies, a parallel follow-up of their lives, which are nothing more than an oblique and uncomfortable reflection of the competitiveness of the not-so-distant business world on the surface, not in vain. underworld is another name that the Mafia is often called. soldiers They are tested to assess their reliability and their ability to progress within organizations. They are a loyal, submissive workforce, and therefore expendable and interchangeable.

Here we have, among many other characters of all kinds, Joe Zucco and Alexis Machine, who fight for their territory with their different illegal activities and their respective plots to hide and launder the results, Charley Flowers and Harry Strega, young people who, with few alternatives (some procured by the handling of weapons in Vietnam), enter the world of crime as a clearer perspective of economic stability. Hits between gangs, traps, score-settling, changes of side, shady characters dedicated to making bodies disappear, all in the usual settings – bars, alleys, front businesses, brothels – and with the constant presence of dialogues of utmost credibility, even in its painstaking translation and, of course, the hallmark of the genre, cruel and gratuitous violence in abundance in a novel whose enjoyment is already objective and unquestionable, but which, considering its publication date, 1973, can only be described as influential and seminal.