Last week I wrote about the theme of repentance and rehabilitation, of going straight and characters course correcting their karmic crop, but this week I’m talking about nastiness unrestrained, a bad guy goes to prison and comes out worse.
Dave Zeltserman has written a trilogy of books with the same opening—a felon gets out of prison. Small Crimes about a bent cop back on the outside; Pariah about an organized crime enforcer seeking revenge against his former boss who sold him out; and Killer about a mob hit man who rats on his boss in exchange for a lighter sentence. All three books have roots in actual crimes and criminals, but the most obvious fiction to life comparison comes from Pariah.
James “Whitey” Bulger was a career criminal rising through the ranks of the Boston underworld and doing stretches in the federal pen till he took over leadership of The Winter Hill Gang in the late 1970s. Using soldiers like Kevin Weeks and Stephen Flemmi, the political power of his brother Billy Bulger and the help of a later convicted federal agent, Whitey ruled the streets till he went permanently on the lam in 1994 just ahead of a wave of indictments. (To this day, he remains on the FBI’s most wanted list.) What came out later when Weeks, Flemmi and the remnants of the Winter Hill Gang were brought down was that James Bulger had been an FBI informant for many years.
In Zeltserman's Pariah the first person narrative is delivered by Kyle Nevin, a sort of mash up of Weeks, Flemmi, and just a dash of John Shea, who is just out of prison where he kept his mouth shut in spite of learning that his former boss had betrayed him. His goals are to get back on top of the streets and to find his former best friend and boss, “Red” Mahoney, wherever he is in the world and make him pay. All he needs is a lot of money to do it with. The course of action he takes is so dark and unsympathetic and delivered in a no-frills, realistic style, it got under my skin and continues to smolder today. But one of the things I never saw coming was the third act...
In 2006 several books by and about Winter Hill members were published including Brutal by Kevin Weeks, Rat Bastards by John “Red” Shea and Brothers Bulger by Howie Carr. Other publishing blunders were being exposed, (even a Kyle Nevin knew who James Frey was). In this, Dave Zeltserman saw an angle for his novel.
Kyle eventually finds himself the darling of the publishing world, having written a crime novel, a fiction that invites comparison to his own story.
“Anyone reading Pariah will probably think I was inspired by (O.J.) Simpson’s failed book, (If I Did It ). Not at all. At the time I thought the behavior of my fictional publisher in Pariah was beyond the pall and would be too extreme for any actual publisher, but I was proven wrong.” (from Dave's blog Small Crimes)
Small Crimes and Killer both have central characters capable of some type of reflection if not always remorse, but Kyle Nevin, the anti-hero of Pariah? Uh-uh. It’s a wild book full of literal insanity and an over the top central character, but for all of that Zeltserman never veers off into groovy perversity. Instead he keeps it grounded in reality and seen through a lens as chilling and remorseless as Jim Thompson put on the page.
“Well, I wrote Pariah to be read at two levels—at one level a crime novel, another level a satirical look at publishing and the celebrity nature in the US—how we can take a vicious thug like Kyle and turn him into a celebrity for the almighty dollar. While I wrote Kyle to be as vicious and despicable thug as possible, I also tried to write him honestly as a human being and not a cartoon character.”
Recently, Whitey Bulger was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in Martin Scorcese’s The Departed and in retrospect it almost seems like he could’ve been on George V. Higgins’ mind when he wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle, (Of course Friends was written thirty years before Bulger’s informant status was known. But still, the Boston setting and all? Weird parallels).
You can read the rest of my conversation with Dave Zeltserman at Hardboiled Wonderland.
Any other true life to fiction crossovers you wanna recommend?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
