Forgotten books Friday--Safe Harbor by Eugene Izzi

So as I mentioned the day before, Patti Abbott asked me to participate in the weekly series of reviewing genre novels that have some how slipped through the cracks and have gone out of print known as Forgotten books Friday. I've been a big fan of the series for the past 6 months or so and was more than happy to add my three-quarters of a cent into the already enormous  number of writer's who already take part in it.

So, being all about the Hard-boiled/Noir side of Pulp fiction, I decided to pick a book from a novelist who has had a fairly large impact on my life as a writer, and who I admire intensely and for some reason or another is very out of print even though he published 17 novels in his all too brief of a life.

The writer I'm talking about is Chicago novelist, Eugene Izzi.

If you're not familiar with Izzi's writing or the man's life,(or his death, which has been more or less turned into retarded conspiracy theorist garbage over the years, where as the man's huge body of work has become all but forgotten.) I'm not going recount it here. But I'll tell you this, Izzi was the type of writer who I truly admire, namely, a once hard living working class kid who found redemption through crime fiction. (Yeah, folks, I'm kind of a bigot like that, as in I tend to think the best novelists are the ones without much formal education and are more or less self taught--no offense to the MFA folks out there.)

Safe Harbor was Izzi's final novel before his untimely death, and is the story of Mark Torrance, a decent enough guy making his way in the world  as a social worker. He's married to a successful psychologist, has three kids, a house in the suburbs, all the good stuff. However, before all the good stuff, Mark was named Tommy Torelli. As Torrelli he lived as thief and all around scumbag for one of the five New York families. But like most mobsters, Torrelli is eventually arrested for a botched caper and is leaned on hard by the NYPD and the Fed's to turn state's evidence and rat out his Maffia family. Tommy--unlike most of his real life contemporaries--stands strong and chooses to remain silent and loyal. The only issue is that Tommy's boss is scared shitless that Tommy will suddenly get scared of doing hard time and rat out his entire crew in order to avoid it, so the boss starts to threaten the life of Tommy's infant son, Mario. Because of these threats, Tommy becomes Mark and goes into the witness protection program in order to protect his son's life.

Life is more or less normal, even happy after Mark and Mario strike out on their own after being sheltered by the witness protection program. Mark meets his wife, they marry, have a couple of more kids, life is good. However, Mark and his wife, Caroline, are starting to experience a wide gulf in their marriage largely because Mark has failed to share anything of his past with her out of fear that she won't understand the mistakes of his past life, he even believes she might even leave him if she finds out. (To all the married guys out their, haven't we learned that the Golden rule is usually the best rule when it comes to marriage.) To add to the overall household tension,

the Torrances' psychotic next door neighbor, Tomczak--who eeks out a minor living as columnist for an alternatively weekly, but is really nothing more than a Mama's boy still tied to her purse strings--is going to break the story of Mark's previous life, which will result in a top notch assassin named Bracken--who is obsessed with committing the perfect murder-- agreeing to take Mark and his family out.

As you can probably already guess, there's a lot going on in Safe Harbor (No, I haven't even mentioned Mark's former witness protection program handler and his dying wife, or the cop set to hunt down Bracken, or Bracken's transvestite lover Tawny, or the racist black boxing coach at Mark's work.) and that's the major issue with the novel as a whole--there's just too much going on. There's too many character's populating the story, so much so that the reader (at least this reader) begins to drift as Izzi fails to move the story along and is bogged down in over characterization. 

The characterization also happens to be the strongest point of the novel. Izzi intimately crafts each character so they become fully fleshed out creations who you can't help but care about. Also, I really feel Izzi and his editor could have easily trimmed this novel down a good one-hundred to one-hundred-and-fifty pages. With Izzi's style being so spare and stark, 2oo-to-250 pages would have really done the trick and kept the book moving along at race car speed. Unfortunately, Izzi was of a generation of novelists where 90,000 words was considered a short novel.

Also, the beginning of the book is such a Goodfellas  pastiche I could barely make it past the opening twenty pages, even though I started to really enjoy the board characterization after ward

So in overall judgement, I'd have to say Safe Harbor isn't exactly the best place to start off in the Izzi cannon. If I was to recommend a title where to begin, I might suggest his excellent novel Invasions or another of his late career novels the Criminalist.

So, anyway,  folks, I didn't promise you Harold Bloom style criticism, but I had fun writing it.

Thanks for your time.