If the Dead Could Speak

by Tim Mahoney

During a howling blizzard in March, 1932, Sadie and Rose, two hard luck women from out of town, are found murdered and burned on the banks of the Mississippi. Bootlegger Mick Powers was among the last to see them alive, and embarks on a dark and dangerous inquiry into who murdered the girls.

300 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2014

About the author

The Gangster Era pulled me in almost from the moment I began researching it. The first book to come out of that research was "Secret Partners." It's a documented history of the Barker Gang and the police chief who was their protector.
But there were many stories to tell, and not all of them could be throughly documented. So I turned to fiction and am now writing the last in a five-book series that tells the stories of the most infamous public enemies, Alvin Karpis, Fred Barker and John Dillinger. All these stories are based on the true crimes of this fascinating era.

Reviews

[Mark]

Great read. If you are interested in the prohibition era gangsters of the 20's and 30's this book is for you. I always thought the gangsters were somewhere else-Chicago or New York, but no, most of the action happened right in my own back yard. This book is historical fiction, but all the main events and bad guys really happened. Well researched.

[L.M. Elm]

If you're looking for a midwest noir set in the 1930s, this is the book for you. Mahoney employs at the expectations: morally questionable lead, molls, gangsters, and violence. At times I felt the plot a bit more complicated than it needed to be, and too many characters came and went too quickly to establish a lasting relationship with, but overall a decent read.

[Jen Westpfahl]

This book (which reminds me a lot of Saint Mudd) has a decent storyline built around some real people and events in St. Paul's sordid history, but it drags on a bit and is a little cliche even for a gangster novel.

I stuck it out to find out who really killed The Burned Ladies. But guess what? You have to read the next book in the series (or maybe all five?) to get the answer. I guess I'll never know. I didn't like it enough to read four more.

[JJ Harrigan]

Lots of nostalgia floats around today about colorful gangsters of the twenties providing innocent refreshment to a public made thirsty by Prohibition. Gross exaggeration argues Tim Mahoney in his novel If the Dead Could Speak. This is the first of four excellent novels about the twenties and thirties, all of which observe gangland through the eyes of an engaging protagonist, Mick Powers.

Mick has made his living for years running errands for a local gang leader in St. Paul, Minnesota. Abetting the gangsters was a corrupt police department and city hall that offered refuge to men on the run as long as they paid for the privilege and didn’t spread their violence locally.

But that cozy arrangement collapses when two young women are murdered and then incinerated for nothing worse than witnessing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong place. Repelled by this turn of events, Mick Powers sets out to discover who killed them. This puts him squarely in a no man’s land between two local gangs, a police chief on the gangster’s payroll, and the sons of Ma Barker as they go about, murder, arson, and kidnapping. Ma Barker herself was later shot dead by the FBI and characterized by J. Edgar Hoover as a “vicious, dangerous criminal.” While her sons were guilty of many violent crimes, Ma Barker herself, according to author Tim Mahoney, probably wasn’t guilty of anything worse than simply being a dysfunctional mother.

If the Dead Could Speak has a special strong point in the deftness with which the fictional Mick Powers interacts with a bevy of real-life people, real events, and real places of the time. A lively world of people has disappeared, all replaced by impersonal technology: traffic cops, elevator operators, street cars, bookie parlors, pay phones, gambling dens, and stifling summers without air conditioning. If the Dead Could Speak brings it all back to life for you.

Author Tim Mahoney’s credentials for the Mick Powers stories are impeachable. He is an editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and author of the definitive history of St. Paul racketeering: Secret Partners: Big Tom Brown and the Barker Gang.

[John Rogers]

A trifecta of a book. Mahoney threads his way through the complex, fascinating world of Prohibition-day Saint Paul, about as far from Minnesota Nice as you can get. A nice noirish plot, but with characters that manage to inflate the cliche characters we might expect with life, humor, quirks. Even the dogs and parakeets have character. Mick Powers is a complicated guy with complicated problems that seem never quite to be solved ... but WAIT, there's another book coming. And if you like historical fiction like I do, you'll love the meticulously researched and beautifully presented story of old St. Paul.