Michael Harvey's Novel The Chicago Way

There's something about a hard-boiled detective novel that just resonates, at least with me. I love the dialogue that comes flying out like bullets. I love the hard-edged detective who is surrounded by danger and traitors and dames who are beautiful but also dangerous and deadly. It's a genre that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler perfected and many who are fans say, died with them. Michael Harvey's novel "The Chicago Way" arrived in stores and was hyped as a return to this genre and, I am happy to say, carries on the tradition valliantly and expertly.

Harvey is probably best known, if you know the name at all, for his work in TV. He is a writer and television producer. His most-famous work is "Cold Case Files" and, no, that is not the show with the blond woman who looks like she has a bird's nest sewn to the top of her head. This show is the one on A & E with Bill Curtis, another Chicago icon, doing the narrating.

In this novel he introduces PI Michael Kelly and, yes, it is a stereoptypical Irish Chicago Cop who has now turned into a private investigator. Sometimes you don't mess with formulas because they work, however. There are still a lot of Irish folks here in Chicago and many of them are cops and while I have not done a survey of all of the private investigators in Chicago, I am betting more than a few of them are Irish and ex-cops.

Kelly runs into his old partner one day and Gibbons is a rough Chicago cop who has had a case from his past come back at him. Eight years ago he came across a woman who had been raped and was repeatedly stabbed. He was never able to find the man who did the assault, but now, the woman who was attacked has come back to ask for his help. Kelly agrees to help, but then his ex-partner turns up dead on Navy Pier and things suddenly get weird and very dangerous.

Harvey knows Chicago, but I have to admit, there is this tendency to hit all of the touchstones that everyone who films in Chicago or tries to show Chicago but is not from Chicago tries to throw in there. For example, the characters actually end up at Mr. Beef, a rather famous Italian Beeft eatery in the heart of Chi-town. It is a restaurant hyped by Jay Leno who has to make a point of visiting the place every time he comes to town. It's the kind of thing producers from LA throw into their movies or TV shows as a kind of wink to Chicago audiences when they are trying to show they are "hip" to Chicago culture and know what we really like. Well, I have never been to Mr. Beef. I preferred Roma;s, quite honest, for my Italian Beef.

Desptie this, the story moves along at a break-neck pace. The characters surrounding Michael Kelly are introduced and each of them has a past and a history and Kelly has been involved in most of it. The characters are interesting and, I felt, well-rounded. This is a book that you could easily see being turned into a film that would be in black-and-white and star Humphrey Bogart.

The plots twists all over the place and the surprises are indeed surprises. You have to really pay attention with this one. If you find yourself drifting off at any point during this novel, you could find yourself wondering, how the hell did THAT happen? Of course, the great thing about books is that you can turn back a few pages and read it all again.

There is heartbreak in this story too. Kelly is hard-edged, but he is not without a heart. He feels for the client he has. He also is friends with a woman with a painful past and this is where the heartbreak comes in.

So, if you love those old hard-boiled detective yarns of yesteryear, you will not go wrong with Harvey's "The Chicago Way." If you live in Chicago, you will appreciate some of the Chicago cliches, but you will also appreciate some of the other references thrown in there as well. I just wish Kelly would have been a Sox fan instead of the customary Cubs fan, so that everyone would get that he is indeed from Chicago.

Harvey is bringing Michael Kelly back in a new book due out later this summer. I, for one, am looking forward to spending time with this character again and reading more about the world he lives in.