This comic-fantasy novel mixes Thorne ("Topper") Smith with P.G. Wodehouse, as it features Nazis in the U.S. who couldn't shoot straight and gangsters who could shoot well but not too wisely.
The novel has two sets of gangsters: the gang run by the psychotic Tommy-Gun Watson, who is traveling east to make a name for himself, and the regular mobs of New York, especially the gang of Roberto (Bugsy) Rittoria and his rival Ratsky Fluegel. As Tommy-Gun and his gang hold up banks, the John Dillinger wannabe checks the New York newspapers to see if he is getting any publicity. He isn't. The newspapers focus more on Thomas Carlyle Watson (also a Tommy) and his efforts to show he deserves to inherit $137 million from Uncle Sinclair Watson's estate. When Tommy-Gun says he's going to be the top dog in NYC, other gangs think he intends to whack them and take over the city. To head off trouble, they send for the legendary hitman Luigi Goldberg O'Brien, who terrifies Midwest mobsters because he keeps forgetting that he's already been paid to do a hit and then goes after them again for his money. They are glad to send him off to drive their competitors on the East Coast crazy.
In the Watson and the Shark suite in the Copley Hotel, Tommy Watson tortures himself that his girl friend and fiance, Ellen Davenport, absolutely hates him for missing a party to celebrate their upcoming marriage. As he gesticulates around the room, he often disturbs Mr. Muttonchops, a ghost who has occupied the room since Mowbray first came there with the Watson family in 1912. Watson cautions Tommy not to sit upon Mr. Muttonchops, and Tommy apologizes, often to what he thinks is an empty chair. Eventually, Ellen calls and forgives Tommy. But she tells him she does expect him at a party the next day. Tommy promises to be there. She also wants him to swear, upon his immortal soul, and forsaking all hope of salvation, that he will be at the big party for the family in February 1937. He agrees and makes her swear that she will be there, too.
Meanwhile, cousin Conrad Blocker (who is also competing for the $137 million inheritance) arrives and comes up with a cock-and-bull story about his being unable to drive. Mowbray can't drive him because he is having dinner that night with Tommy's future father-in-law, Judge Frank Davenport. Conrad insists that Tommy owes him a favor and should drive them up to the University for a party being given in Tommy's honor. Conrad plans to get Tommy drunk (easily done with only two beers) and then get him embarrassed in the newspaper because of an affair with a stripper who jumps out of a cake. Unfortunately, that stripper turns out to be Bubbles LaBonza, who is known as "the Boom-Boom Girl from Padukah." Unfortunately, she's also the girlfriend of a very jealous Bugsy Rittoria.
Judge Davenport is questioning Mowbray about his ability to see ghosts and learns that he can't tell a ghost from a regular person. The supposed ghost might be wearing out-of-date clothing; however, in New York or London, the "ghost" might simply be an actor in a play set way in the past. Unfortunately, during their meal, a ghost seats herself at their table. The Judge can't see her. She is later revealed to be murder victim Hattie McCann, and, being mute, she tries to pantomime a message to the Judge with Mowbray's help: Kirov Bern, a man whom he has sentenced to death, is not guilty of murdering her. Infuriated with Mowbray for interfering in his case by suggesting that the killer is Monroe Jones, the Judge stomps out, cursing himself for believing in the possibility of such nonsense..
At the party, Conrad finds that it's a simple matter to get Tommy drunk, and it amuses him when he also gets Bubbles O'Brien intoxicated. When the time comes for her to jump out of the cake, she is so plastered that she topples over into Tommy's lap hardly aware that her top has been pulled down. The press cameras snap away with shots that will make the morning edition, after the art departments have blurred her nipples with "icing" from her cake.
As Tommy tries to drive back to the city, a policeman pulls him over and arrests him for drunkenness. The cops in this small town initially think that Tommy is the vicious psycho who has been holding up banks. By noon the next day, they have discovered that he's only the playboy possible heir to a fortune. Mowbray arrives to pick him up, but it is impossible for Tommy to make it to Ellen’s party.
Two events now converge a little later. First, Tommy is having a reconciliation dinner with Ellen in the restaurant in the Copley Hotel. Conrad drops by and gives more hints about Tommy's arrest and general shame, only to have Bubbles LaBonza barge in and demand the rest of the money that was promised to her. Tommy protests that he has never spoken to her. Ellen Davenport, feeling betrayed again, hurries to her car and runs red lights as she speeds out of the city toward home. Also in the restaurant was Luigi Goldberg O'Brien, who watches as Tommy drinks the wine that Conrad has poured for him and, when drunk, claims that he himself is Tommy-Gun Watson, not Tommy-Wommy-Mommy-Wamby-Pamby Watson. Luigi sees off-duty cops in plain clothes in the restaurant and decides not to shoot Tommy there. When Tommy walks around a nearby park to clear his head, Luigi sticks a gun in his back and ushers him into the backseat of a car owned by Bugsy Rittoria.
The gangsters take Tommy and a gang bookkeeper out to a remote railroad trestle over a river and shoot them. With his feet encased in concrete, Tommy falls toward the water thinking of the vow he had made on his immortal soul to be at the party. Meanwhile, all of the emotion in Ellen's life bursts through, and she is practically blinded by the tears as she races around the curved roads. She is thinking of the foolishness of her vow when she goes off a ridge and is struck in the head by a tree limb as she is speeding 40 miles per hour around the curve.
Now everyone is wondering where Tommy and Ellen are. One newspaper is silly enough to suggest that Tommy may have run off with the stripper and gun moll, but a stick of dynamite in the pressroom convinces the editors and reporters that another scenario is more likely. Mowbray and the Davenports are distraught; even Conrad is upset. He's not sure what happened, but he figures he probably had a role in it. Ellen had teased her mother Emma that she would have that party on her immortal soul, so, despite her daughter's absence, Emma is making sure that all the family come to Davenport Farm that weekend in February.
Not everyone misses Tommy. At the Tweed National Bank, the Watson Estate Committee is stacked with pro-Nazi sympathizers, and they are looking forward to denying the $137 million to either Watson or Blocker and to giving the fortune to Thy Magic, a front organization that will preach isolationism and minding our own business. They know that, if either cousin tries to isolate himself to avoid temptation, he will violate the terms of Uncle Sinclair Watson's will.
One night, Mowbray is awakened by the sounds like those once by Tommy when he was messing about in the bathroom. Woozy from sleeping pills, he can't believe he is seeing Tommy. In the hot, steamy bathroom, it seems as if he can see through him at times. Tommy is trying to get the stink of the river off him and sends Mowbray back to bed. In the morning, Mowbray lets the Davenports know that Tommy has come home, but he doesn't know anything about Ellen. The Davenports want him to come up for the party that Emma had promised to give.
While Tommy is at Davenport Form, Ellen appears to her sister Connie and has a reunion with her relatives. She can't explain what has happened. She and Tommy are delighted to see each other, and neither has any complaint with the other.
Tommy-Gun Watson now reaches New York City and is getting ready to take over. A kid on the front desk gives him the key to the Watson Suite. While Tommy-Gun is in the suite, a pair of Nazis knock on the door and hope to get him drunk enough to go out to Liberty Island and "piss on the Statue of Liberty." They offer him a job with Thy Magic's All-American cereal company, but Tommy-Gun is afraid of traveling on ships or airplanes. Since Tommy-Gun can't locate the heir to kill, he focuses on hitting the other gangs. His gang now includes cynical Blackie Schwartz, the good-natured hayseed JoJo Nelson, and Percy (Crazy Legs) Lloyd. They are all skittish because Tommy-Gun had killed Danny Yankers, a know-it-all who suggested that Tommy-Gun was a screw-up. Tommy-Gun had liked how Danny described escaping from a jail by puking and putting the vomit on the face of an unconscious defense attorney who resembled him. The remaining gang members manage to kill Ratsky Fluegel, but, since Bugsy was away, are only able to shoot up Bugsy's office and butterfly collection. Crazy Legs is a casualty. Bugsy is furious with Luigi because apparently this Tommy-Gun fellow is still alive.
The gangs converge on Tommy's hotel room while Tommy-Gun is showering. Blackie Schwartz escapes and decides on a change in careers while he catches a train to anywhere out West. JoJo Nelson escapes but locates a "liberry" where he can hole up for a while. The gangs focus their attention on Tommy-Gun, still soapy and covered only in a towel. He makes it to the roof and, seeing no way down, jumps to the adjacent building, the Women's Athletic Center. He makes his way to an empty restroom and shaves off his moustache just as a bell rings and sends a flood of young women into the restroom. Amid the screaming and laughing, police arrive and sympathetically usher him into a car and take him to a secret location in another hotel.
This time, when the Nazis show up and offer him a job in Europe, Tommy-Gun agrees as long as he'll be some place safe. The Nazis want to celebrate by having dinner at a fine restaurant, where they hope to get him drunk and, once again, agreeing to "piss on the Statue of Liberty." Instead, Tommy-Gun gets the Nazi drunk and goads him into quacking like a duck and saying "Heil Hitler" while waddling around the restaurant giving the Nazi salute.
Conrad is relieved that no harm has apparently come to Tommy and Ellen and calls into a popular radio show for Piggy Ayres and His Swingin' Swine to dedicate a song to the couple for their party at Davenport Farms. Unfortunately, Bugsy Rittoria is listening and gets his gang into their cars to take care of the asshole. Luigi Goldberg O'Brien has decided to go his own way and goes to the library to locate the addresses of prominent New Yorkers, including judges, particularly Judge Frank Davenport. At the library, he is wary but connects up with a hayseed called JoJo.
One evening at the farm, a deputy drives out to pick up Judge Davenport, who needs to identify a body. As they near the town, they are about to pass the farm of Monroe Jones, and he remembers that Mowbray claimed that Hattie McCann's ghost said Jones was guilty of her death. The deputy says that Jones has been in town celebrating that night's upcoming execution of Kirov Bern. On an impulse, the Judge gets the deputy to pull in, and they search the outbuildings on the farm. They finally locate the ring that had been cut from Hattie's body, and the Judge hurries to call the governor to stop the execution. In town, at the morgue, everyone is acting odd about the death. They wheel out a body on a gurney, and it takes a lifetime, it seems, for the Judge to recognize that the deceased is Ellen. He asks them not to make an announcement about the death until Monday, and, though puzzled, they agree. When he gets home, he thinks he has to deal with an imposter pretending to be Ellen.
Back at the house, Emma greets him and then fusses at him for not speaking to Ellen, even though she is standing right there on the stairs.
Unable to sleep and numbed by grief because of the death of Ellen, the Judge sits at the kitchen table, where he is encounters Mowbray. Mowbray accepts the Judge's profound apologies, but he is saddened when he realizes that she is a ghost. The Judge is asking what he can do since he can’t see her. If he says the wrong thing and tells everyone she’s dead, then no one will be able to see her. Mowbray agrees to act as the Judge’s eyes and ears.
The uncles in the Davenport and Hart families like to play a game of Trial, since it irritated the Judge who complained they were getting it all wrong. They always play the game anyway and this time demand that Mowbray be the bailiff. After they charge a great aunt with being a cross-dresser, to her annoyance, they go to the next trial. Mowbray pulls out a charge slip from one basket and two defendants from a second one: Tommy Watson and Ellen Davenport are charged with being ghosts without a license. After the banter of the game that ends with Tommy convicted and Ellen ruled not guilty, the Judge and Mowbray conclude that she probably has something, a task, that she must accomplish. They agree, if it meets with the approval of Ellen and Tommy, to move up the wedding to midnight of the next day.
During a lunch the next day, Ellen and Tommy are wandering the grounds. Unknown to them, they are being shadowed by Luigi Goldberg O'Brien, who has a silencer on his pistol. As they recline, Luigi puts a bullet between Tommy's eyes, but nothing happens. He aims at Tommy's temple and pulls the trigger, but, again, they seem oblivious to him. When they leave, he sets up some soft drink and beer bottles where they were and fires again from the same distance, this time breaking each target.
Emma Davenport has not been feeling well and was resting when Mowbray comes by. She tells him about the hot kitchen and how she thought she could see through both Ellen and Tommy. Sick to his stomach, Tommy locates the Judge and sobs that Tommy has been killed, too, probably by the gangsters who dumped him into a river.
The Bugsy Rittoria gang parks near Davenport Farm and spots Luigi walking about and muttering to himself. Bugsy scoffs at Luigi's poor marksmanship and vows that, once again, he himself has to do the real work. With his aide Tuba Delgado, they creep toward the nearly midnight wedding party and up the stairs to a deck, and Bugsy screws on the silencer. From the deck, Bugsy has a clear shot at Tommy's head and pulls the trigger, but nothing happens. He aims for the chest, the back, the belly, but still nothing happens. As he is thinking about what to do next, he notices Luigi talking to JoJo and, to shut down that problem, shoots him in the head. JoJo is standing next to his new best friend, sees a shooter on the porch, and shoots him. Tuba Delgado, not wanting to have a big mess outside the city at a judge’s house, carries Bugsy's body down the stairs and out to the cars.
The Judge can't see Ellen and Tommy during the ceremony, but he is aware of a light becoming more golden as the wedding ceremony progresses. Finally, the vows are complete and he gushes, "Emma, I can see her." The bride and bridegroom are waving to the wedding guests but not heading toward Tommy's car, but, instead, they go over the hillside, floating, it almost seems, until they disappear in a brilliant light . The members of the wedding party are all delighted at how clever they were.
On Monday, Mowbray and the Judge reveal that Ellen and Tommy had been ghosts. The family is stunned but realizes that a greater good had united the two. Back in the city, Mowbray eventually regains his equilibrium and looks for something else to do. Tommy has left him a fair amount, by his standards, but he does not to be idle. The Watson Estate Committee will not accept Tommy's death until the body is eventually discovered. It eventually is, and the good behavior clock is reset with Conrad having to keep out of trouble for a year. Mowbray decides it might help him sort out things if he goes back in service and works for a Baron Culdraca, who has moved from Northern Italy to an old mansion he has purchased in New York state.
And Tommy-Gun? Tommy-Gun gets to Germany and hates the oom-pah-pah music and everything. He figures out that the Nazis would be trying to kill him and fakes his own death by the way suggested by Danny Yankers. He escapes, holds up banks, and is tracked down by the S.S. They mistake him for one of their agents and want to send him back to the U.S. under an American passport to work in a munitions factory and then sabotage the factory when war came. He was being flown back on an amazing airship called The Hindenburg. On board, he meets this Baron Culdraca and expects an uneventful arrival at the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Genre: FICTION / Science Fiction / GeneralI have mainly sold books at book signings and writing events, and I'm not sure how to check rankings on Amazon's Create Space. One problem I have is that I used a Bowker ISBN number, not knowing that Amazon Create Space would not list the book for libraries and book stores.I have put out a second edition and retitled it Mowbray & the Sharks. The Amazon webpage unfortunately still leads with the first version, and the reader has to scroll down to see the second edition.
Mowbray is a naturalized American, whose father had worked as a valet/butler on several estates in the U.K. The narratives of the five books (so far) are set in England, Northern England/Southern Scotland, the U.S. (from New York down to Florida), Italy (Rome, Florence, Northern Italy), etc.
The two black touring cars hunkered on the winding road and seemed to search for prey from the crest of the hills of rural Ohio. The twelve cylinders in each engine purred as the occupants of the cars salivated as if they could taste the mouth-watering green meal waiting them at a little two-story brick building facing the crossroads below. All they would have to do is get their luncheon trays and their eating utensils and surprise the yokels at the Farmers’ National Bank as they made off with the collard greens of commerce.
The right rear door of the lead car opened, and Tommy-Gun Watson stepped heroically into the dust of the country road. His black hair was slicked back, and the sun glinted brightly on the brilliantine. He rubbed his pencil-thin moustache, already smeared where his razor had slipped and he had filled it in with a No. 2 stub.
As he struck a pose, this champion imagined himself in a Movietone news reel, and then he cocked his chin towards the bank below. He said, “Boys, this is a fatuous moment.” He heard the Movietone narrator say, “Like the bravest of heroes, he paused at the fatuous moment.”
Tommy-Gun liked high-flown language, but he also relished short-cuts in life: robbing instead of working, stealing a car instead of buying one, and guessing at the pronunciation or spelling of words instead of actually looking them up in a dictionary.
Two of the gang members suspected that there was no such word as fatuous, while the rest vaguely thought that fatuous meant “fat” or “fateful.”
“Remember the time, boys,” Tommy-Gun continued, “10:32 a.m., on Friday, September 25, 1936. We have the birth of the bank-robbing gang of Tommy-Gun Watson. No more country stores and gas stations.”
No member of the gang reacted since they knew it was dangerous to predict the rhetorical direction their boss was heading.
| Language | Status |
|---|---|
|
Portuguese
|
Already translated.
Translated by Vanessa Dias da Silva
|
|
|
Author review: I am not multi-lingual, despite having Latin in high school and German and Ancient Greek in college. Unfortunately, I approach those languages as if the text was a crossword puzzle: I have to look up each word and write it out. That means I am impressed when I encounter individuals who are able to communicate in two or more languages. Ms. Vanessa Dias da Silva is such an impressive individual. She tackled my comic/fantasy novel, MOWBRAY AND THE SHARKS in a timely manner, and, alas, although I cannot read the Portuguese, I am able to track the general flow of the sentences. (Hey, I should. I wrote them, after all.) |
|
Spanish
|
Already translated.
Translated by Liliana Backmann
|
