Ace Boon Coon (Tales of Elliot Caprice)
Author Danny Gardner immediately plunges readers into the thick of the action in Ace Boon Coon. The book is his second novel featuring Elliot Caprice, a former Chicago cop who makes a dangerous, tenuous living working as an investigator. It’s the early 1950s, and Jewish, Irish and Black racketeering mobs — not to mention the Nation of Islam, ruthless real estate developers, white racists, the expanding University of Illinois, rapacious bankers, random thugs, migrant workers, racist police and federal agents from Estes Kefauver’s Special Committee on Organized Crime — are mixing it up. Caprice scrambles to stay one step ahead after a murder exposes his connections with both Jewish and Black criminals. His personal life is pulled into the dangerous web in part because he’s trying to help his uncle save the failing family farm in Southville. Soon it’s clear that Caprice himself faces mortal danger.
Race and racism are squarely at the center of much of the story, both in Chicago society and in many scenes as the light-complexioned Caprice is sometimes seen as white. Gardner brilliantly shows readers the difference between how the world treats a white man and a Black man, and what it feels like to be that man.
At its best, the book is a fast-moving noir with a conscience and sense of humor, built on a smart plot that brings in myriad social justice elements. I was less pleased with repeatedly having to track back to figure out what was happening with a flashback or maybe one complication or character too many. It pulled me out of Caprice’s world of danger, politics and poverty as he struggled to bring about a small measure of justice.
