THE SYNDICATE

Nonfiction
Down and dirty noir

THE SYNDICATE

By Clarence Cooper, Jr.

144 pp. Molotov Editions

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

A book reviewer’s job is to review the latest offerings, both fiction and nonfiction, by today’s authors for today’s readers. But once in a great while, he gets the opportunity to review something like this – a long-lost work finally published many years after it fell into obscurity.

Clarence Cooper, Jr., an African-American writer of considerable talent, deserves a place alongside his contemporaries James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Born in Detroit in 1934, he moved to Chicago in 1950, where he began his literary career working as an editor for a black newspaper.

At the same time, he began his nearly lifelong struggle with heroin addiction. Most of his writings were penned in prison, as he spent most of his life in and out of jail. His first novel, The Scene (1960) was published to critical acclaim.

The rest of his novels ended up buried in the slush pile at Regency House, a publisher in Chicago, until an editor – Harlan Ellison – rescued them. As the civil rights movement reached its apex, Cooper briefly became a sensation.

His last novel, The Farm (1967), based on his time spent at a state prison farm for drug addicts in Kentucky, was published by a New York house. It received few reviews, but was loudly derided by the black press. Cooper stopped writing and his heroin addiction began to consume him. He died broke and forgotten on a New York City street in 1978 at the age of 44.

This novel, The Syndicate, published the same year as his first novel, only appeared outside of the United States, and under a pseudonym, for obvious reasons. Like James Baldwin, Cooper aimed to be far more than just a black writer who wrote for black readers – and he had the talent to do it.

The Syndicate is an old-school noir crime thriller narrated by a killer. Andy Sorrell is an enforcer for the organized crime outfit that he and the other characters simply call “the Syndicate.” His boss Lou Fulco has promised to pay him $10,000 to eliminate three men.

The novel opens with Sorrell meeting his contact Brace Lilly, a flamboyant gay nightclub owner in the Gold Coast town of Hollisworth, to get the specifics on the job. The three targets – Harv Cassiday, Al Benedict, and Chess Horvat – were low-level gangsters with more guts than brains. They double crossed the Syndicate and made off with over half a million in mob money.

Sorrell’s job is to find them, kill them all, and recover the stolen money. He starts by interrogating Tina Meadows, a stripper at Lilly’s club who may know the whereabouts of the aforementioned Al Benedict. When she refuses to talk, he beats her bloody.

Tina cracks and tells him that Al is staying at the Blue Haven sanitarium ten miles away – he’s dying of lung cancer. She wasn’t kidding; barely able to talk, Al tells Sorrell that he was double-crossed by his partners Harv and Chess. He never saw a penny of his share and he doesn’t know where the money is.

After strangling Al Benedict, Sorrell returns to Hollisworth, only to be worked over by two cops – Captain Vin Markle and his crony, Hendricks – in retribution for Sorrell’s working over of Tina Meadows, Markle’s girl. But the two dirty cops aren’t stupid – they’re not about to whack or even arrest a Syndicate man.

From there, things just get more complicated for Sorrell. First, Brace Lilly’s wife Naida (it’s a marriage of convenience) arrives to give him some womanly comfort – a present from Lilly. She has an unusual quirk – she becomes sexually aroused whenever a man beats the hell out of her.

Then Sorrell finds that he’s being tailed. He confronts the tail, who turns out be George Eversen, the headwaiter at Lilly’s club. An older man fearful for his life, Eversen confesses that it was Brace Lilly who orchestrated the ripoff of the Syndicate carried out by Benedict, Horvat, and Cassiday.

With Eversen’s help, Sorrell begins hunting down Horvat and Cassiday, but after Lilly turns up dead, he realizes that more people want to get their hands on that stolen mob money – including the dirty cops Markle and Hendricks. The only one he can trust is himself. Well, maybe not.

You see, there’s one more thing complicating his task of whacking the thieves and recovering the money – ever since the death of his pregnant girlfriend Carolyn two years ago, Andy Sorrell has been losing his mind…

The Syndicate is an unusual, potent mix of brutal, fast-paced 1950s pulp noir seasoned with a dash of William Burroughs style surrealism and homoerotic undertones, as seen in these opening paragraphs:

Anyone could tell at first glance that Brace Lilly was a fairy. His smooth skin and neat little lips just didn’t set right on my stomach, and the rest of those goons he had standing around his desk looked just as queer as he did, the only difference being those stiff hunks poking out under the armpits of their dinner jackets.

He waved a delicate hand at me. “Sit down, darling.”

I sat, but all the rods made me nervous, and I couldn’t see the sense in Lou Fulco sending me all the way to the Coast to play hotsy-totsy with a gay boy.

Lilly slid one long forefinger against the side of his cheek and watched me like I was funny, too, and I started to burn just a trifle.

A lost crime fiction classic found again, The Syndicate is highly recommended to mystery fans and a testament to the talent of a forgotten writer who deserves to be remembered.

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com