It's 1954, and in Phenix
City, Alabama, everything's for sale. Main Street is full of illegal casinos
and strip clubs, and for customers who want more than a pole dance, there's
always room for negotiation, especially since Sheriff Burt Fuller has a habit
of picking up underage girls and farming them out to the local prostitution
ring. A small handful of people fight a losing battle against the sleaze, led
by Albert Patterson, whose candidacy for state's Attorney General has the crime
bosses on edge. When Albert is gunned down one night, it's the last straw;
while his son John moves to take his place at the capital, ex-boxer and
all-around stand-up guy Lamar Murphy works with the National Guard to clean up
a mess that will go to any length to protect itself.
Wicked City moves between Lamar's
first-person narration and a third-person perspective that follows the various
undercurrents of Phenix nightlife, from a corrupt D.A. to some mid-level thugs
to a young couple's struggle to save each other in the face of seemingly
limitless corruption and greed. Phenix City is a real place, and in an
introductory note, crime writer Ace Atkins explains that though he's made some
changes, "Many of the large events in this novel are true." Some of Atkins'
attempts to inject period-specific trappings into his setting are heavy-handed,
but even during the story's melodramatic heights, he maintains a level of
realism that keeps the story from edging into camp.
City explores familiar
territory; Atkins doesn't have Jim Thompson's grasp of psychology or Dashiell
Hammett's sharp prose, but there's a melancholic romance in his depiction of
the wasted lives of Phenix. The problem is, none of those lives stick around
for long, and not just because of the novel's body count. City has a number of plot
threads to keep track of, and nearly all of them get short shrift, which makes
for some frustrating reading. Whenever a scene builds up a good head of steam,
Atkins shifts elsewhere, and an indeterminate amount of time gets lost with
each shift. It's like watching the final montage of The Wire without ever getting to
see the rest of the show; there are lovely moments, but without any buildup or
background, there's no real reason to care.