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Books

Time traveling to Tampa, 1955

WHITE SHADOW
By Ace Atkins
Putnam, $24.95, 370 pp

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published May 7, 2006

The year is 1955. A once-powerful gangster lies murdered. Tough cops sweat their suspects, then soothe their nerves at smoky bars. Dangerous women take bloody revenge, and reporters scramble for scraps of truth.

Los Angeles? Chicago? New York? Think again. White Shadow, a delicious slice of noir by Ace Atkins, is set in Tampa.

Atkins’ first four novels, featuring blues musicologist-investigator Nick Travers, were set in New Orleans. Before he became a full-time novelist, Atkins was a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune, and some of the old, cold cases he heard about in those days stuck in his brain.

One of them, the unsolved murder of Tampa crime kingpin Charlie Wall, is the focus of White Shadow.

Wall was the white-linen-suited black sheep of an upper-crust Tampa family (his father served as the city’s mayor), involved in gambling and other criminal pursuits starting in his teens. In the 1920s and ’30s, he was a major crime boss of bolita and bootlegging in Ybor City.

By 1955, Wall was a has-been, spending most of his time drinking and bragging in local bars. When he is found inside his sprawling Ybor bungalow — every door locked — bludgeoned, his throat cut, amid little sign of struggle, there are plenty of suspects.

A smart but troubled cop named Ed Dodge gets busy tracking them down, while a still-slightly-green police reporter for the Tampa Times named L.B. Turner tries to keep up.

Dodge and Turner are among the few fictional characters in Atkins’ novel. Most are real people: Mafia capo Santo Trafficante Jr., small-time thug Johnny Rivera, lawyers Red McEwen and John Parkhill, and a whole cast of detectives, socialites, newspaper editors, bartenders, wrestlers, circus sideshow performers and more. Even Fidel Castro puts in an appearance.

Atkins did voluminous research for this book. The case file on Wall’s murder alone was almost 2,000 pages, and he spent countless hours talking to historians and retired detectives and reporters.

It shows. The dark, twisted plot of White Shadow and its complex, often surprising characters make it a fine example of hard-boiled crime fiction, but for anyone who remembers Tampa before the days of chain everything and metastasizing development, it’s a fabulous piece of time travel.
Atkins’ characters dine at the Goody-Goody and Las Novedades, buy their suits at Wolf Bros. and shout at pro wrestling matches at Fort Homer Hesterly Armory.

Cigar company billboards puff out clouds of smoke, Ybor City is populated by families, the Sapphire Room at the Floridan Hotel is one of the swankest bars in town, and to get from downtown Tampa to Gandy Bridge, Turner has to drive past orange groves and cattle pastures.

If you remember that Tampa, White Shadow will give you an extra serving of thrills. And if you don’t, let Atkins tell you about those tunnels under Seventh Avenue.

[Last modified May 8, 2006, 17:28:43]