MURDERTOWN

Last week, I received some great news.  My third Hank and Marvin mystery novel was finally published and became available in bookstores and on Amazon.  This made me very happy because I love writing the Hank and Marvin novels.

Why do I love writing this mystery series set in a Polish American neighborhood in Chicago?

The answer is easy.

I taught creative writing at Eastern Illinois University for almost 30 years, and when I taught it, I always told my students that the first and principle requirement of all good writing is that what the student writes has to be important to him.  It has to be so personal that every word the writer writes is a word that means something to him.

I feel this way about the Hank and Marvin mysteries.  I don’t appear in these mysteries, but pieces of my life do.  The houses we lived in appear in the novels, the stores and restaurants I grew up around appear in them, my school and my parish and the park I loved playing in all appear in the novels, and my friends and neighbors and family members (even my mom and dad) appear in the novels.  Writing these novels is like visiting the past, like a vacation in the world I lived in in  my teens.

But mystery novels are more than just a vacation in the world I lived in in my teens.  There’s got to be something to those novels, some crimes at the center of those novels, and crimes there are, plenty of them, and they’re crimes I knew as I was growing up in my Polish-American neighborhood in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

Let me give you a few examples.  

The first Hank and Marvin mystery is entitled Suitcase Charlie, and it’s about the fear I felt as an 8 year old because of some murders that happened in Chicago.  Three young boys were coming home from the movies when they were kidnapped and murdered.  Their bodies were found naked and dumped in a ditch.  The murderer who did this wasn’t captured until decades later. The fear I felt of someone doing this to me or my friends is central to Suitcase Charlie, a novel about a series of brutally murdered children showing up in suitcases on street corners in Chicago.

The crime that’s at the heart of Little Altar Boy is also one that’s central to my life.  The novel deals with a pedophile priest in a Polish-American parish near Humboldt Park and a series of crimes that develop around him.  Much of the novel takes place in and around St. Fidelis Parish, my parish for a long long time. It had two priests who were pedophiles, sexually abusing children in my grade school.  I didn’t know this at the time.  I found out years later when one of my friends told me about how he was abused by one of the priests.  When he told me this, I started writing the novel.

Murdertown, the most recent of my mysteries, is probably the most personal.  My family lived east of Humboldt Park for more than two decades.  We loved the area.  The park was always beautiful, and the neighborhood was a community that always spoke to us.  It was full of Polish-Americans like us, people who survived the concentration and slave labor camps in Germany and came to Chicago after spending years in the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany.  When my dad went down Wasthenaw for a beer, he knew he’d see people who had struggled for years to survive the camps.  When my mom went shopping on Division Street, she always ran into women in the bakeries and butcher shops who, like her, had seen their families killed by the Germans.

We loved the neighborhood and then something happened that made that love impossible.  Gangs moved into the neighborhood, and the crime rate exploded.  I saw friends beaten so often that going outside the house was considered dangerous, but that wasn’t the  worst of it.  There were also murders.  A grade-school friend of mine was murdered, one of the tenants in our apartment building was murdered, one of my parents’ oldest friends was murdered in a bar on Division Street.

Then houses in the neighborhood started being set on fire.  The house my parents loved and lived in for 17 years was burned down completely.  The houses on either side of our house – houses my friends lived in – were also destroyed by fire.

The search for who caused all of this violence and chaos and brutality is at the center of my novel Murdertown.

Like I said earlier, writing these novels is like taking a vacation into the past, but sometimes even the best vacations have their dark moments. 

FIRST AMAZON REVIEW OF MURDERTOWN

First Amazon Review of Murdertown -- the 3rd Hank and Marvin mystery 

Review of my novel is by David Rabin, award winning mystery novelists

5 STARS -- A Lyrically Written, Absorbing, and Deeply Affecting Police Procedural

In 1975 Chicago, police detectives Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz are up to their ears in homicides in the rapidly deteriorating neighborhood of Humboldt Park—a small-time gangster, a child walking home from a grocery store, an elderly Polish war hero and many more. Are these murders random? Or are they connected by some inexplicable motive? In this third installment of the Hank and Marvin series, Guzlowski paints a vivid picture of urban decay, political machinations, and the efforts of decent people to carry on amid the senseless violence surrounding them.

The investigation of the crimes will keep you quickly turning the pages, but it’s only part of the story. This book transcends the events that propel the plot by showing us how the crimes affect the people who investigate them. Guzlowski takes us into the psyches of Hank and Marvin, who, after three decades of police work, are struggling to retain their humanity and empathy despite the understandable urge to surrender entirely to cynicism. Every day brings additional reinforcement of the knowledge that brutal crimes will plague innocent people no matter how hard and long the detectives work, and the central theme of the book is why they continue in the face of futility. Guzlowski ultimately answers this question with a metaphor that gives us hope for humanity.

Amazon Link

May 3, Polish Constitution Day

 May 3, Polish Constitution Day

May 3rd was always a big holiday for us when I was growing up in the Polish Triangle in Chicago in the 1950s.  There were parades and parties and my parents and their friends singing the old songs they sang in Poland, the songs of hope and Polish honor and the beauty of the trees and fields beneath the Polish sky.  

This is a poem I wrote to commemorate that day.   It's in my book about my parents and the war, Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

Poland 

They’ll never see it again, these old Poles 

with their dreams of Poland.  My father 

told me when I was a boy that those who tried 

in ‘45 were turned back at the borders 

by shoeless Russians dressed in rags and riding 

shaggy ponies.  The Poles fled through the woods,

the unlucky ones left behind, dead 

or what’s worse wounded, the lucky ones

gone back to wait in the old barracks 

in the concentration and labor camps

in Gatersleben or Wildflecken

for some miracle that would return them 

to Poznan or Katowice.  But the world

wasn’t listening or its hands were busy 

somewhere else.  Later, in America

these Poles gathered with their brothers

and with their precious sons and daughters

every May 3, Polish Constitution Day, 

to pray for the flag.  There was no question 

then what the colors stood for, red for all 

that bleeding sorrow, white for innocence.

And always the old songs telling the world 

Poland would never fall so long as poppies 

flower red, and flesh can conquer rock or steel.