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.