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Blind Moon Alley is hard-boiled, gritty enjoyment

John Florio is a journeyman writer of anything that covers the rent, and a closet novelist who’s finally come out with two very entertaining mysteries and the possibility of the creation of a new, classic noir protagonist.

This fascinating, albino street creep has conscience, style, brains and courage enough to overcome his unsettling appearance and the petty corruption parading as life on the streets of Philadelphia during the dog days of Prohibition and depression.

Blind Moon Alley will be released this week from Seventh Street Books and features another piece of rousing bad luck for Jersey “Snowball” Leo, an entirely new antihero in the classic character format of Mickey Spillane, Walter Mosley, Dashiell Hammett and that coterie of pulp fiction writers of the 1930s and ’40s.

An albino attracts attention unwanted by the subject and beholder in equal measure, but for an albino kid brought up in the underclass of New York and Philadelphia during Prohibition, underground is under ground: sunless, airless, friendless, never safe from reek and rats.

Leo pours moonshine in a speakeasy in South Philly that’s owned by a local goniff and frequented by gangsters, dirty cops, hookers and swindlers – which covers just about everybody in big cities with neighborhoods that have unbecoming nicknames.

The problems for Leo begin when he saves a little girl from being run over by a bus and makes the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer. That act of heroism attracts the attention of Aaron Garvey, a high school chum from Hoboken, New Jersey, who’s on death row for murdering a cop who needed killing and invites Leo to join him at his final dinner before he’s strapped to the chair and the lights dim on the South Side.

Blind Moon Alley is hard-boiled fun with real characters you’ll immediately love, and a romp that will make you yearn for the good old days you’re too young and privileged to have known.

You’ll get to know – and root on – Myra Banks, who’s now a sultry nightclub performer since she got her club foot fixed, and Leo’s ex-boxing-champion father, who runs a gym for punks in Harlem and keeps Leo’s crazy world off the ropes. Other characters include the street-magic Johalis and Homer the dimwitted dock worker and slippery Madame Curio the card reader.

With this motley crew, Leo digs for the truth about his friend Garvey while trying to stay under the radar of a wholly corrupt police force he’s serving free drinks to every afternoon at the Ink Well, “a colored joint, a tiny hole tucked away in the narrow basement of a nondescript brownstone on Juniper and Vine.”

Hard to stay in the shadows when you look like you’ve been cast from candle wax and paper mâché – and harder yet when you cope with the bad hand you’ve been dealt by being honest and a good friend. Florio is molding a new classic protagonist in Jersey Leo. He tried him out in July 2013 with Sugar Pop Moon and is bringing him even more alive with this release.

Oh, did I mention that Aaron Garvey escaped prison after Leo had dinner with him on death row that Tuesday night?

Jeff@jeffMannix.com. Jeff Mannix is a local journalist and author.



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