Elegy

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

ORGANIZED CRIMES by Nicholas von Hoffman Harper & Row; 274pages; $14.95

Nearly every journalist believes he has a novel in him. But if he manages to produce the work, it often bears a disquieting resemblance to journalism. Nicholas von Hoffman's first novel, Organized Crimes, is a happy exception. This is no self-absorbed memoir of How I Broke the Big Story or of backstairs city-room intrigues; indeed, its only journalist of consequence is in the pay of mobsters and is introduced to the narrative at the moment he is shot dead.

The book's setting is Chicago in the 1930s, an era of celebrity gangsters, ruined financiers, penniless immigrants, left-leaning intellectuals and psychotic anarchists, all of them interconnected in Von Hoffman's ruefully comic invention. The period is as rich and varied as the turn-of-the-century New York City of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the range of real-life characters is even greater: Hoodlums Al Capone and Frank Nitti and Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Mayors Big Bill Thompson and Anton Cermak, Roman Catholic Cardinal George Mundelein, Utilities Tycoon Samuel Insull and Assassin Giuseppe Zangara, who struck down Cermak in Miami while trying to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Thrust among them is a fictional couple, both, fittingly enough, students of social anthropology. Allan Archibald, a moneyed North Shore Wasp, witnesses the murder of the reporter and on a bet undertakes to write a scholarly paper about the Chicago underworld. Irena Giron, a brilliant but unworldly girl from the Polish ghetto "back of the yards," catastrophically encourages Allan to learn more about the style and ferocity of the syndicate. Organized Crimes is part political satire, part informal history, part rumination on the Depression, part love story between the rich boy poor in spirit and the poor girl rich in perception. Von Hoffman's elemental themes are deftly woven into the episodic narrative: among men of power, there may be differences of method but not of motive; between brains and privilege, choose brains, because money and position may prove fleeting, while intelligence endures.

Von Hoffman, a former columnist for the now defunct Chicago Daily News and for the Washington Post, writes with occasional Second City vulgarity and feistiness. But he can also display an elegiac grace about a world in which everything, everywhere, has suddenly gone wrong: "Heading along the street to where he had parked his car, he looked up and saw a dark red, liver-colored sky, full of ores and oxides and particulates. The droughts of last summer had been followed by the winds of November. Although Allan did not know it, he was seeing the State of Oklahoma blowing past Chicago, traveling east. The Dust Bowl had begun."

Von Hoffman's large cast and its machinations remain credible and, even in the comic passages, are never overdrawn. But the author is more than an adroit tale spinner; it is character, not accident or circumstance, that brings his central figures to grief. In the process, he merges Chicago myth, legend and history with poignant private truth. This journalist, at least, had not only a novel but a genuine novelist in him.

--By William A. Henry III