Man Full of Trouble: Pause for the Cause

A brief update before the mayhem resumes!

Of course I left you with a cliffhanger.

I mean, that’s what mystery/crime writers do, but this one wasn’t intentional. The previous installment of Man Full of Trouble was laying the groundwork for a chapter about how the Great Flu of 1918 took the lives of my great-grandmother and great aunt. As I was working on that chapter, filling in some research gaps, I had a distracting but possibly excellent breakthrough.

As Jeffrey Lebowski once put it: new shit had come to light.

That’s because this chapter is not only sad, but also a kind of detective story. Because my great-grandmother and great aunt caught the flu during one of the earliest waves of the pandemic, and I wondered: how? Well, I think I’ve stumbled upon the answer, but I’m still pinning down the facts. And I don’t want to serve up a half-baked platter. Of, er, flu.

So instead of holding up the works indefinitely, I’m going to jump ahead a little to the heart of this pulp non-fiction memoir thing: the killing of Officer Joseph T. Swierczynski. After all, this is what you’re here for, right? A good old-fashioned hardboiled gangster story. And I want to give you the goods, see? (It helps if you imagine James Cagney spitting out that last line.)

And as it turns out, March 20 will be the 106th anniversary of Joseph T.’s murder, so that’s when I’ll be posting the next installment.

Hang tight. We’re just getting started.