Dirty Little War: A Crime Novel

Taking a dive is not Huckabee Waller’s style, much to the displeasure of the gangsters taking bets on the bare-knuckle fights near Chicago’s stockyards. It’s 1920, and Prohibition is the law of the land. Huck, who hopped a boxcar heading north after killing a pimp in New Orleans, turns to earning a living in illegal boxing matches. Impressed by Huck’s pugilistic skills and his past as a Louisiana moonshine runner, Dean O’Banion, head of the notorious North Side Gang, recruits Huck into smuggling booze across the Canadian border. Huck also runs a sideline as security for John D. Hertz’s Yellow Cab Company, which is involved in a vicious and violent competition with Morris Markin’s Checker Taxi. Soon Huck is rolling in dough, but his new luxurious lifestyle comes at a cost. When his new wife, Karla, urges him to find more legitimate employment, hitman Gypsy Doyle reminds Huck that the only way out “is feet first and horizontal.” Winner of the 2022 Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel (for Under an Outlaw Moon), Kalteis has written a tough, epic historical noir that covers the most tumultuous decade in Chicago’s mob history. The Zelig-like Huck encounters infamous mobsters of the era (O’Banion, Johnny Torrio, Vincent Drucci, Al Capone) and becomes tangentially involved in some of the most notorious killings (St. Valentine’s Day massacre). As the body count rises, Kalteis’s punchy, hard-boiled prose vividly captures the brutality behind the glitz of the Jazz Age. Fans of Max Allan Collins’s Nathan Heller historical mysteries and The Road to Perdition will enjoy this gritty novel.