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Many thanks to Emma Welton (@damppebbles on Twitter) for organising this blog tour
Outline...
The series is made up of 3 books.
Book 1. The Bowery Slugger follows young Jew Alex Cohen as he arrives in New York with his family from the Ukraine in 1915 aged 15. He falls in with an organised crime gang and rises rapidly until he departs for the Great war.
Book 2. East Side Hustler sees Alex return from the war, destitute and suffering from PTSD. He rejoins organised crime thanks to an old mentor and rises quickly again through the years of prohibition. He now also has a family to protect.
Book 3. Midtown Huckster sees Alex as part of a syndicate hitman team in the 1930s but the feds are onto him and his friends are turning on him.
My Review...
The Alex Cohen Series is an enjoyable ride through the early history of organised crime in America.
It was clearly organised and had easy to follow time lines. e.g. Alex arrives in 1915 and is 15 years old so it is easy to follow his age as the years roll by.
Book 1 is 1910s, Book 2 is 1920s and Book 3 is 1930s.
The plot is simple in that it follows his career in crime. There is violence a plenty as the book themes would suggest.
I think it has similar backdrops to Peaky Blinders and the Godfather films especially part 2 ( where we see a young Vito Corleone rise through the slums in New York at the turn of the century.) The main difference is both the characters of Vito Corleone and Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders both had a strong moral code. However warped it was, it was still a moral compass and it succeeded in getting us to invest in the character. For example, Vito raises Tom Hagen, a street child, as his own son, he does favours for the community in return for favours that he may never call in, as with Enzo the baker. As a result we see him as a good man that does bad things. Alex does none of these things, he is just a bad man that does bad things including murdering a drunken man in a bar for falling into him and killing innocent women. The only decent thing he does is to try to distance his parents and siblings from his career. Which in all honesty is probably what these gangsters were like. The result is that we just don't love him like the other two characters mentioned. The series just about crept into my four star bracket. If I was a little more invested in Alex's character it would have been pushing for 4.5.
The three main women characters were literally the unattainable girl next door, the tart with a heart and the gangster's moll again probably very accurate for the time but could have been developed more.
There are two main areas where the book excels. Firstly it weaves real life mobsters and hits into the story. Alex Cohen is like a Forest Gump of the mafia in that he pops up at all the crucial points in history and interacts with all the main players. The author paints him to the general mafia folklore with skill and dexterity.
Secondly.. And this is the best part of the books, he transports you in time and place. You get encompassed in the background. I love immersive books like this. The best of the books for me was book 1 where this feeling of being wrapped in hustle and bustle and smells and sound is at its best among the poverty of the immigrant hordes coming into New York. Book 3 was also interesting with our protagonist being faced with a menacing antagonist in the form of Thomas Dewey of the FBI.
The Alex Cohen series is a satisfying, immersive and educational trawl through early American mafia history.
Selected Quotes...
"A man shouldn't do business on the street unless he is buying a hooker."
"We work together, we live together but we die alone."
"but beneath every union official was a grifter seeking fresh ways to make a turn."
" ....unable to believe they were sitting amid a gun battle when all they had been expecting was crispy, fried duck."
About the author...
Leopold Borstinski (Twitter handle @ borstinski) is an independant author whose past careers have included financial jounalism, business management of financial software companies, consulting and product sales and marketing as well as teaching.
There is nothing he likes better so he does as much nothing as he possibly can. He has travelled extensivley in Europe and the U.S. and has visited Asia on several occasions. Leopold holds a philosophy degree and tries not to drop it to often.
He lives near London and is married with one wife, one child and no pets.
Thanks for being part of the blog tour :)
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