On June 20, 1947, someone using a .30 caliber military M1 carbine pumped several bullets into the notorious mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel through a window of his palatial Beverly Hills home. So died the man who has come down through history as the founder of modern Las Vegas, which he had envisioned as a gambling paradise in the desert and a fountain of new wealth for the New York Mob. Although no one was ever charged with Siegel’s murder, speculation raged in the press. And the British screenwriter and author Guy Bolton follows one line of speculative inquiry to unmask a possible killer in his novel about Hollywood and the Mob, The Syndicate. The book is a delightful romp through post-war Hollywood, filled with gun-toting mobsters, A-list movie stars, black-suited G-men, headline-seeking Congressmen, and a crusading reporter.
The Mob kidnaps a former LAPD detective
The Syndicate is the second of Bolton’s novels about LAPD detective Jonathan Crane but is not in any normal sense a sequel. Eight years have passed since the events of 1939 that crowded the pages of The Pictures. Crane has left behind the LAPD and the Hollywood studios. He now lives and works on a small farm miles from Los Angeles with his seventeen-year-old son, Michael. Suddenly their peaceful lives are shattered when three mobsters invade their home and “invite” Crane to accompany them to meet their boss. When he politely declines, the men seize Michael and cut the tips off several of his fingers while holding down a struggling Crane. Then, threatening to kill the boy if Crane resists further, they hustle him off to Las Vegas and deliver him to the head of the New York Mob, Meyer Lansky.
The Syndicate (Jonathan Crane #2) by Guy Bolton (2018) 400 pages ★★★★★
The detective must solve Siegel’s murder—in five days
Lansky astonishes Crane with the explanation for his kidnapping. He wants the former cop to identity Siegel’s killer—within five days. If he does, the gangsters will let both him and his son go. If he doesn’t, well, that’s the end of them.
But Crane hadn’t ever been a real cop. True, he had been a lieutenant at the LAPD, but his real function was to serve as a “fixer” for the Hollywood studios. If a star overdosed, or ran down someone while driving drunk, or committed some other crime, Crane’s job was to make the charges go away. He was very good at that. But he’d never been practiced as an investigator. The fact that he’d taken on the Chicago Mob back in 1939, helping send all their bosses to prison, was no proof of his skill as an investigator. At least that’s Crane’s own opinion.
Unaccountably, though, Lansky trusts him. And he assigns an associate, a tough-talking New York mobster named Abe Levine, as his assistant. Thus the two set off on a frantic and seemingly futile quest to solve Bugsy Siegel’s murder
A terrific story, suspenseful to the end
The story that unfolds involves Crane’s old nemesis, the Special Agent in Charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, and a feisty woman reporter for one of the city’s leading newspapers who’s in search of the big story. Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, the biggest of the studios, plays a major role, too. There are also mobsters galore, the honest cop who heads the LAPD homicide unit, the anti-Communist publisher of Hollywood’s trade paper, lots of big-name Hollywood stars, and the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). It’s a terrific story, and suspenseful to the end.
About the author
Guy Bolton is a British screenwriter who lives in London. He is a graduate in Film & Literature from Warwick University. The Syndicate is his second novel, a sequel to The Pictures. He also has two television series and two feature films in development, according to his agents.
For related reading
Previously I reviewed the first Jonathan Crane novel, The Pictures (A riveting tale of corruption in Hollywood’s Golden Age).
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