Suitcase Charlie - Little Altar Boy - Murdertown

Last spring saw the release of the third of John Guzlowski's crime novels, titled Murdertown. The series Hank & Marvin—Chicago Detectives, featuring detectives Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz, is not envisioned as a trilogy, though. The author has already submitted two subsequent novels to the publisher and is currently working on his sixth, and presumably final, book in the series. The series was inaugurated in 2018 with the publication of the first novel, Suitcase Charlie, in which Guzlowski's detectives have already been cops for a decade or so and are now attempting to solve the mystery of the murders of young children after bodies chopped into pieces and stuffed into sturdy suitcases start cropping up in the Humboldt Park area in Chicago.The series follows a certain pattern: the novels take place every decade or so, starting in the 1950s in Suitcase Charlie, through the 1960s in Little Altar Boy, to the 1970s in Murdertown. This decision allows the author to depict the changes that have occurred in the neighborhood where he grew up. What is more, apart from a captivating mystery, the narratives also offer some social critique, discussing a salient issue of the day. In the case of the first novel, the issue in question is that of anti-Semitism. All of the victims of the murderer the press calls “Suitcase Charlie” have isosceles triangles cut into the soles of their feet to resemble the Star of David; thus, the two detectives are positive that the killer is an anti-Semite wishing to incite hatred against Jews. Hank's sidekick, Marvin, is of Jewish descent himself, and it was actually his desire to counter anti-Semitism that made him a police officer. Interestingly, Marvin never refers to himself as white—even though currently over 95 percent of US Jews actually identify as white1—which may prompt a reflection on whiteness as a category that is far from monolithic or easy to define.2In Little Altar Boy, set in the mid-1960s, Guzlowski invites his readers to consider the space of the local church and parish school as a locus of crime, namely pedophilia and murder. As he explains in the author's note appended to the novel, St. Fidelis school in Humboldt Park was “the center of [his] world as a child” (p. 317). As an adult, however, he found out that the parish had “an extensive history of pedophilia” (p. 318), which was silenced by church authorities, as a result of which the perpetrators “were never tried, never brought to justice, never publicly disgraced” (p. 319). In this context, Little Altar Boy may be argued to be performing an act of literary justice, commemorating the victims of pedophilia as well as taking the Catholic Church to task for its failure to protect its most vulnerable members. This in itself is a commendable act on the part of the author, as it complicates the image of the Catholic Church, which as a general rule enjoys a reputation as an institution that was crucial to the preservation of Polish ethnic identity in the US.3 Guzlowski does not challenge that position but rather points out that an institution's status as a pillar of the Polish community in itself does not preclude corruption and evil.Finally, in Murdertown, Guzlowski addresses ethnic succession in urban neighborhoods, drawing attention to the intersection of ethnicity and social class status, a topic in which he has already shown interest in the previous novels in the series. Murdertown is set in the Humboldt Park area in the mid-1970s, and the neighborhood is described as inhabited mostly by Hispanics—in contrast to the previous novels, especially Suitcase Charlie, when it was predominantly an Eastern European enclave. Now Humboldt Park witnesses a series of murders that at first glance seem to be unrelated; however, a closer investigation leads the detectives to find out who benefits from crime and overall dilapidation of the neighborhood—and it turns out that it is not ethnic minorities or even ethnic gangs.Guzlowski is well known as a poet, and while his poetry seems to serve as a vehicle for writing about his parents’ World War II experiences and the family's first steps in the United States, the brief synopsis of his crime fiction that I offered here—without giving away too much of the plotlines, I hope—indicates that his detective novels often offer a platform for social critique. The texts’ terse style and strong language notwithstanding—full as they are of expletives and slurs used by both criminals and the detectives that all in all contribute to a sense of verisimilitude—Guzlowski's sensibility as an academic and profound thinker shows through, for example, in his sensitivity to issues of racial segregation, ethnic prejudice, economic injustices of the late capitalist society, and the like.