Suitcase Charlie

Fiction. Detective and Police Procedural. Chicago, May 30, 1956: On a quiet corner in a working-class immigrant neighborhood, a heavy suitcase is discovered on the sidewalk late at night. Inside is the body of a young boy, naked and hacked into pieces. Two hard-drinking Chicago detectives are assigned to the case: Hank Purcell, who still has flashbacks ten years after the Battle of the Bulge, and his partner Marvin Bondarowicz, a wise-cracking Jewish cop who loves trouble as much as he loves booze. Their investigation takes them through the dark streets of Chicago in search of an even darker secret--as more and more suitcases turn up. "Every detective has a case that haunts him. For the Chicago cops Hank Purcell and Marvin Bondarowicz, that would be the 'dead kid in the suitcase' whose broken body epitomizes 'some kind of evil that was one-of-a-kind, fresh and original down to its buttons.' In writing SUITCASE CHARLIE (Kasva Press, paper, $14.95), John Guzlowski was inspired by a true crime that horrified his city in 1955 and retains the power to shock us today. Even the hard-bitten police lieutenant in charge of the fictionalized case is shaken by the singular brutality of the unknown killer. 'And when you find him, ' he tells his officers, 'I want you to hurt him.' The sheer cruelty of the case's multiple murders demands coarse language, at which Guzlowski excels. But in describing the saintly Sisters of St. Joseph nuns who live near the murder scene as 'tough broads, eyes like razors, ' he lets us know that, back in the day, the city of Chicago was an all-around rough town."--Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times "SUITCASE CHARLIE (Kasva, 321 pages, $14.95), a tough-as-rusty-nails police procedural by John Guzlowski, is set in Chicago in the spring of 1956--when the radio is playing hits by Frank Sinatra and Chuck Berry, many citizens are smoking Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes, and Dragnet and General Electric Theater are TV favorites. In Mr. Guzlowski's book, the 'second city' is being terrorized by a series of child killings in which the small victims are drained of blood, dismembered and stuffed into luggage left in public spaces...Each environment the detectives visit] seems spookier than the last in a narrative driven by lyrical anxiety. Little by little, Purcell--treading the blurred line between burnout and breakdown--perceives these sickening new crimes as the fruit of diseased notions and lingering hatreds from earlier decades and even centuries. 'I thought all of that bad s--would just disappear when the war ended, ' Purcell tells his wife. 'And it didn't. It's still here.'"--Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal