Marilyn the Wild - Jerome Charyn

 Marilyn the Wild is the first of the Isaac Quartet but was the second to be written.   Marilyn is the daughter of the colossus that is Isaac Sidel, Chief Inspector of the NYPD and undisputed king of the East Side.   Marilyn, as the title suggests, is a little wild.  She has just abandoned her third husband and is now shacked up with Manfred 'Blue Eyes' Coen, who happens to be Isaac's fool, the arch amid Isaac's Angels.

Isaac was once one of a trio of young High School chess prodigies.   Now all three men are in their forties, separated or divorced, and each plagued with a single more or less grown child.   Mordecai's daughter Honey is on the streets, pimped by black dudes.   Philip's teenage son Rupert has run away with an exotic Sephardic girl.

Isaac is off to Paris for an international cop conference.  Whilst there he tracks down his long-absent faher Joel, who ran off to be an artist and now lives happily in the Jewish quarter with his Vietnamese girlfriend.   Isaac's family is a constant source of stress.   His brother Leo is in the civil lock-up for unpaid alimony.   Their mother Sophie keeps a junk shop on Essex Street.   While Isaac is in Paris, he gets a call: Sophie has been attacked in her shop and is in a coma.

Isaac descends on the Easr Side like a typhoon.   He quickly establishes that a bizarre teenage gang ('lollipops) is responsible for the attack and a bunch of seemingly random, not to say pointless, petty crimes.   The gang consists of a very young male, a slightly older female, and a stocky oriental guy.   What is more, Isaac comes to realise that their crime wave is somehow focused on him personally.

It's a crime novel.   It reflects the Seventies in which it was written.   But Marilyn the Wild is much more than that.   It is a deep dive into the world of Jews in mid-century New York.   The NYPD is either Jewish or Irish (Isaac's estranged wife Kathleen is Irish, thus Marilyn's wildness is deemed inevitable), but Isaac is very aware of black and hispanic inroads being made into his domain - two of the most memorable characters are the Peruvian brothers Jorge and Zorro.   The world Charyn conjures is a racial kaliedoscope, albeit anchored in the Jewish world which is both his and Isaac's point of origin.   The prose fizzes, the dialogue zings.   The story romps along but it is the characters who stay with the reader.

I am hugely impressed.   So glad I bought the collected quartet from 1984.

The Force - Don Winslow

Been waiting months for this, Winslow's latest, soon to be a major TV series, to come out in paperback. The moment I hear it's in the shops I'm off to Waterstones to snap up my copy. Started reading it that same night.


For anyone who saw The Shield or read Joe Wambaugh's Choirboys back in the Seventies, there's nothing new here. In fact, the situation is slightly worse than that. The storyline in The Force is virtually identical to that of The Shield. The behaviour of the NYPD is no worse in 2017 than it was in the Wambaugh more than forty years earlier. Indeed, Wambaugh's cops were better drawn and I cared more about their fate.


For those, like me, who have read Winslow's Power of the Dog, The Cartel and - best of all - Savages, The Force comes as a massive let down. In those earlier novels Winslow had staked out a territory all his own, with multiple intersecting storylines and deep background. This is New York, ground well and truly trodden, and reads more like a TV novelisation than original fiction. In fact, were Winslow an unknown, I doubt it would ever get accepted for TV because the male anti-hero is a walking-talking stereotype and there is no strong woman to counter him. This latter point is a criminal shame because the other Winslow books I mentioned are packed with interesting women.


It is not badly written - Winslow couldn't write badly if he tried - but compare it with Savages, where even the layout of the words on the page fizzes with invention, and it's pretty stodgy stuff. I liked the character of Monty and I liked Malone's snitch Nasty Ass. Other than that I didn't give two hoots about any of them, especially Malone which, when you've spent 480 pages seeing the world entirely from his point of view, is a frankly damning indictment.