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Pork City
When former Tribune reporter Jake Lingle is gunned down on the streets of Al Capone's Chicago, in June 1930, tough Tribune publisher Colonel Robert McCormick becomes determined that someone will pay for the crime.
- GenresFiction
264 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1988
About the author
Howard Browne
203 books19 followersHoward Browne (April 15, 1908–October 28, 1999) was a science fiction editor and mystery writer. He also wrote for several television series and films. Some of his work appeared over the pseudonyms John Evans, Alexander Blade, Lawrence Chandler, Ivar Jorgensen, and Lee Francis.
Beginning in 1942, Browne worked as managing editor for Ziff-Davis publications on Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, both under Raymond A. Palmer's editorship. When Palmer left the magazines in 1949, Browne took over in January 1950. Browne ended the publication of Richard Shaver's Shaver Mystery and oversaw the change in Amazing from a pulp magazine to a digest. He left the magazines in 1956 to move to Hollywood.
In Hollywood, Browne wrote for television shows including Maverick, Ben Casey, and The Virginian. His last credit was for the film Capone (1975), starring Ben Gazzara.
Beginning in 1942, Browne worked as managing editor for Ziff-Davis publications on Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, both under Raymond A. Palmer's editorship. When Palmer left the magazines in 1949, Browne took over in January 1950. Browne ended the publication of Richard Shaver's Shaver Mystery and oversaw the change in Amazing from a pulp magazine to a digest. He left the magazines in 1956 to move to Hollywood.
In Hollywood, Browne wrote for television shows including Maverick, Ben Casey, and The Virginian. His last credit was for the film Capone (1975), starring Ben Gazzara.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
July 12, 2011
I was turned on to the fairly obscure hard-boiled writer Howard Browne by a colleague, and so when I saw this in a second-hand shop I snapped it up. It met and exceeded my expectations with its fascinating tale of a mobster hit on a Chicago newspaperman in 1930 (on June 9 no less-- my birthday!). I quickly caught on that this was a fictional retelling of real history, replete with a colorful cast of actual people, including Al Capone, Bugsy Moran, Joe Aiello, and a wide variety of detectives, investigators, lawyers, prosecutors, reporters, gangsters, bootleggers, mugs and dames. The tale gets labyrinthine and a mite confusing with all its characters, but it's great and cynical fun from start to finish, well-written and involving. If only Browne's various books were easier to find........
June 11, 2013
In June 1930 in Chicago, a newspaper reporter, Jake Lingle, is killed in the underground tunnel between Michigan and Randolph streets. Only, as Dion O'Banion, of Chicago's North Side gang says, "There's two kinds of guys you don't lay a finger on - men of the cloth and newspaper slobs." But someone seems to have forgotten this tip. Lingle worked for the Chicago Tribune and McCormick, the head of the paper offers a $25,000 reward for information leading to arrest and conviction. He also sets up his own special staff of police and prosecutors that will report to him -not the corrupt city officials. There have been over 600 mob-related deaths and no one has been convicted and he's determined that this wlli not happen with this case.
Patrick Roche of the detective division who has always been honest is brought in as are his second in command, Walter Wendt, and Charles Rathbun, whom Roche doesn't completely trust. It turns out from digging into his past, that Lingle was not an honest citizen or reporter. He was a go-between, for a percentage, between the gangs and the "upright" judges, politicians, etc. He also had a lover in the only daughter of a mob leader from New York City. The information is not pleasing to McCormick, but he feels that he needs to go on with the case - Lingle still didn't deserve to die like that and he WAS a reporter.
So, the search begins for Lingle's killer, no expense spared, and the gang man that hired the killer. Even though the serial numbers on the gun, which was dropped beside Lingle's body along with a glove, have been filed off, a new process enables them to come up with the numbers, trace the gun from the manufacturer to the store and from then to who purchased it. The killer is tracked down within a short time, but then they need to make sure who hired him and get him to talk. They find witnesses who swear to the killer, but as soon as the press leaks that it's a member of the North Side gang the witnssees begin to back down and so they made a mistake. There is even a follow-up on the main characters after the trial.
Then the gangs get in on the act and a rival gang has the man who hired the shooter killed. Which leaves Roche, and especially the prosecutor, Rathbun, in a fix bescause they have nobody to threaten the killer with.
the main facts and characters in the story are real and true. The conversations are perhaps not totally authentic. But it makes an interesting read into a sort of understanding of the times then in Chicago.
Patrick Roche of the detective division who has always been honest is brought in as are his second in command, Walter Wendt, and Charles Rathbun, whom Roche doesn't completely trust. It turns out from digging into his past, that Lingle was not an honest citizen or reporter. He was a go-between, for a percentage, between the gangs and the "upright" judges, politicians, etc. He also had a lover in the only daughter of a mob leader from New York City. The information is not pleasing to McCormick, but he feels that he needs to go on with the case - Lingle still didn't deserve to die like that and he WAS a reporter.
So, the search begins for Lingle's killer, no expense spared, and the gang man that hired the killer. Even though the serial numbers on the gun, which was dropped beside Lingle's body along with a glove, have been filed off, a new process enables them to come up with the numbers, trace the gun from the manufacturer to the store and from then to who purchased it. The killer is tracked down within a short time, but then they need to make sure who hired him and get him to talk. They find witnesses who swear to the killer, but as soon as the press leaks that it's a member of the North Side gang the witnssees begin to back down and so they made a mistake. There is even a follow-up on the main characters after the trial.
Then the gangs get in on the act and a rival gang has the man who hired the shooter killed. Which leaves Roche, and especially the prosecutor, Rathbun, in a fix bescause they have nobody to threaten the killer with.
the main facts and characters in the story are real and true. The conversations are perhaps not totally authentic. But it makes an interesting read into a sort of understanding of the times then in Chicago.
January 1, 2009
I was curious about this because Howard Browne is compared to Raymond Chandler, one of my favorites. Evidently Browne once met Chandler and told him, “I’ve been making money off you for years.”
For the first time in my life I read such a book by an author compared to Chandler and was pleased rather than massively disappointed. In part Browne has similarities to Chandler but his is not trying to copy him. Most notably he conveys data by reporting what is said and indirect ways of reporting observations; he never says, “I thought...”
The story is based on an actual murder, a reporter in Chicago in the 1930s. He follows a lot of characters and jumps back and forth a lot.
I liked it and look forward to reading more of his stuff.
For the first time in my life I read such a book by an author compared to Chandler and was pleased rather than massively disappointed. In part Browne has similarities to Chandler but his is not trying to copy him. Most notably he conveys data by reporting what is said and indirect ways of reporting observations; he never says, “I thought...”
The story is based on an actual murder, a reporter in Chicago in the 1930s. He follows a lot of characters and jumps back and forth a lot.
I liked it and look forward to reading more of his stuff.
January 13, 2016
I had heard the comparison between Raymond Chandler and Howard Browne. This was the only book available by the author in the Connecticut library system. I had hoped to find one of the Halo series but it appears i'll have to purchase that. This is a fictional account of a historical event. Taking place in Chicago in the 1930s it features Al Capone and plenty of gangsters, loads of crooked cops and politicians, A bad woman with a heart of gold, bootleg liquor, and of course, honest cops. Lots of characters who are well handled, fair dialogue, and a tricky case that's followed from the beginning to the end. PS while this is an entertaining tale, I find nothing in it to substantiate the rumor that Howard Brown can out Chandler Raymond Chandler.
February 23, 2019
This is not the longest or most thorough look at the "Chicago Outfit" and corruption in the Windy City during the days of Prohibition. What it is, though, is the best, most precise, and deceptively simple book I've read about gangsters, since ...well, since ever. And since the author of this book, Howard Browne, is also the guy who wrote what I consider to be the best P.I. novel I've ever read ("The Taste of Ashes") , maybe it's time for me to just lump him in the category of all-around favorite writers and forget talking about something as granular as genre. The guy's just a flat-out master.
"Pork City" follows the machinations of a city that get set in motion when a news reporter is murdered under an elevated train platform in Chicago. In a decade in which over six-hundred gangland killings was considered extraordinary (not 2019 in America!) the lives of members of the Fourth Estate were still worth something, and shooting someone like Mr. Lingle should have been a no-no.
Except there was some evidence that Jake Lingle was on the take. It doesn't make him necessarily evil that he could have succumbed to the blandishments that fell so many (it's hard to turn down easy money any time, and doubly difficult during a Depression), but this moral ambivalence, this darkness, is something that Howard Browne mines so skillfully that his tale (a true story, by the way) ceases at some point to read as a crime novel and becomes simply a great parable about the desire to bring truth to light, and failing.
The writing is spare, staccato at times and nearly like haiku in its unadorned perfection. Other times it feels as terse as a telegram being sent by someone who doesn't have a lot of money to waste on excess words. The cumulative effect, though, is to create a kind of literary tone poem about the tacit (and sometimes active) hand we all have in concealing the truth.
Good doesn't always prevail. In fact, it rarely does. It's the job of politicians, businessmen, people in media, and those posing as artists to pretend otherwise. It's the job of that small coterie of real artists to occasionally to remind us of the truth. Howard Browne does that here. Highest recommendation.
"Pork City" follows the machinations of a city that get set in motion when a news reporter is murdered under an elevated train platform in Chicago. In a decade in which over six-hundred gangland killings was considered extraordinary (not 2019 in America!) the lives of members of the Fourth Estate were still worth something, and shooting someone like Mr. Lingle should have been a no-no.
Except there was some evidence that Jake Lingle was on the take. It doesn't make him necessarily evil that he could have succumbed to the blandishments that fell so many (it's hard to turn down easy money any time, and doubly difficult during a Depression), but this moral ambivalence, this darkness, is something that Howard Browne mines so skillfully that his tale (a true story, by the way) ceases at some point to read as a crime novel and becomes simply a great parable about the desire to bring truth to light, and failing.
The writing is spare, staccato at times and nearly like haiku in its unadorned perfection. Other times it feels as terse as a telegram being sent by someone who doesn't have a lot of money to waste on excess words. The cumulative effect, though, is to create a kind of literary tone poem about the tacit (and sometimes active) hand we all have in concealing the truth.
Good doesn't always prevail. In fact, it rarely does. It's the job of politicians, businessmen, people in media, and those posing as artists to pretend otherwise. It's the job of that small coterie of real artists to occasionally to remind us of the truth. Howard Browne does that here. Highest recommendation.
November 19, 2024
An interesting read and not your run-of-the-mill detective novel. This one is based on a real-life gangland murder of Jake Lingle that occurred in June 1930 and it is more or less what might be called fictionalized non-fiction or fictional history. True to the times, the book is written in a hard-boiled style - reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett. The author, Howard Browne, was a professional magazine editor and script writer and there is a visual, movie-like quality to this work. The chapters are often composed of a series of scenes, not necessarily chronological or connected, some as short as two or three paragraphs, that reveal elements of the larger story. At moments, it felt like I was reading the novel and seeing it at the same time... an unusual sensation. Overall, the writing is first rate and authentic. Chicago and the culture of the day are in the forefront, with passing mention of the city's main thoroughfares, motor vehicles, hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, sports teams, popular songs, newspapers and radio stations. The author also makes ample use of everyday slang, popular expressions and profanity. There are even a few similes in the mix that Raymond Chandler might have used. The mystery and "whodunit" elements of the story are well developed and carried through to the final chapter of the book. For me, an enjoyable read and one that's motivated me to start looking for other works by Howard Browne.
July 26, 2022
This is the fictionalization of the true-life murder of a reporter in 1930's Chicago. It combines actual facts with speculation and lots of fun dialogue filled with 30's slang. It was a little confusing keeping all the names straight, and there are a couple scenes that I still can't figure out the purpose of, but all in all, a fun detective book.
October 17, 2022
3.5 rating. Read as a friend has a family affiliation with one of the main characters of this historical fiction story based on the true gang land killing of a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1930. Lower rating as there were so many characters in the story I had a hard time keeping them all straight and sometimes the level of detail describing the scene made me speed through.
Want to Read
October 6, 2018Synopsis: based on the killing of reporter Jake Lingle in 1930 in Chicago by the mob. There was a $25K reward.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews