Forty-three years after his death the old comrades of the now legendary Jack "Legs" Diamond are reminiscing atop their bar-stools in a somewhat boozier than Conradian vein. Among them, her memory juiced-up by the drink, one Flossie recalls that Diamond "had a tan collie, could count to fifty-two and do subtraction", that he "could turn on the electric light sometimes just by snapping his fingers", that "he could tie both his shoes at once". But the story that's enclosed within this romanticizing frame [Legs] and told us by William Kennedy's ersatz-Marlowe—a lawyer called Marcus who's paid to bail out the boys and front the mob with a clean bib and tucker—amounts to something less fantastic but considerably more gripping. Not that the narrative is consistently exciting: it does come with longueurs and detumescences, and as is the wont of stories told in flashes back it lights up only in flashes. Still, these climaxes are certainly worth waiting for….
Above all, though, the coherence and attraction of the novel are a matter of tonality. Acidic mots are jerked out of the sides of bad-mouthing bad guys' mouths in the best manner of 1940s movies about 1920s gangsters. Legs has met Fitzgerald; he likes Von Sternberg films; he follows the boxing careers of Jack Sharkey and Benny Shapiro. And his world is delightingly peopled with the likes of Mendel (The Ox) Feinstein, Murray (The Goose) Pucinski, Tony (The Boy) Amapola, Edward (Fats MacCarthy) Popke, and Big Frenchy De Mange.
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