Chicago - by David Mamet (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A big-shouldered, big-trouble thriller set in mobbed-up 1920s Chicago--a city where some people knew too much, and where everyone should have known better--by the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Untouchables and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Mike Hodge--veteran of the Great War, big shot of the Chicago Tribune, medium fry--probably shouldn't have fallen in love with Annie Walsh. Then, again, maybe the man who killed Annie Walsh have known better than to trifle with Mike Hodge.

In Chicago, David Mamet has created a bracing, kaleidoscopic page-turner that roars through the Windy City's underground on its way to a thunderclap of a conclusion. Here is not only his first novel in more than two decades, but the book he has been building to for his whole career. Mixing some of his most brilliant fictional creations with actual figures of the era, suffused with trademark "Mamet Speak," richness of voice, pace, and brio, and exploring--as no other writer can--questions of honor, deceit, revenge, and devotion, Chicago is that rarest of literary creations: a book that combines spectacular elegance of craft with a kinetic wallop as fierce as the February wind gusting off Lake Michigan.

From the Back Cover

Jackie Weiss, Mike Hodge wrote, had died of a broken heart, it being broken by several slugs from a .45 . . .

Set in a mobbed-up 1920s Windy City, Chicago is the first novel from David Mamet in more than two decades, an electrifying saga of retribution, double-cross, and honor across the canvas of a metropolis peopled by the corrupt, the cynical, and the deceived. From its opening fusillade to its astonishing conclusion, Chicago is a page-turning thriller of the highest literary order.

Review Quotes

"Tommy guns, bootleggers and hard-living newsmen: David Mamet adds a vivid novel to a legendary tradition." - Wall Street Journal

"The finest American writer of his generation." - Sunday Mail

As if Cormac McCarthy had decamped from Southwest to Midwest...Chicago feels like one of the great American male novelists of the late 20th century -- Updike, Mailer, Bellow, Roth--trying his hand at writing a genre novel. But unlike those novelists' somewhat less sure-footed lunges...Mamet lands this with aplomb. - Los Angeles Times

"Chicago is tremendous fun, with much to savour." - The Times Literary Supplement

"Few writers are better at bringing the smart, charged dialogue of the theater into conventional prose... The story moves at a careening pace... Of a piece with character studies such as E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and John Sayles' Eight Men Out, Mamet's book does Chicago--and organized crime--proud. An evocative, impressive return that Mamet fans will welcome." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The story moves at a careening pace... Of a piece with character studies such as E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and John Sayles' Eight Men Out, Mamet's book does Chicago--and organized crime--proud. An evocative, impressive return that Mamet fans will welcome." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Acclaimed playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross) and screenwriter (The Untouchables) Mamet unpacks his literary arsenal in his first novel in two decades.... Mamet offers a master class on dialogue.... For readers of Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane. - Booklist (starred review)

"All the trademarks of a Mamet production -- electric dialogue and a hurtling pace." - New York Times

"Full of twists and surprises...Mamet's new novel is a treasure, a piece of fictitious history entrenched in an era of violence and love." - Harvard Crimson

"Splendid... a riveting crime drama in a throwback journalistic world, a time when you could yell for a copy boy to bring you Dixie cups for your illegal liquor. But this novel has a romantic heart, and the emotional stakes complement the whiskey-drenched whodunit." - USA Today