Jack Boyle

Boyle, Jack. Boston Blackie. 1919. MysteriousPress.com/Open Road, 2014.
I first encountered Boston Blackie in old films on 1950s TV and Saturday matinees. He never impressed me as a kid, but the name stuck with me. I could never figure out from the films why he was called Blackie or what he had to do with Boston, because the filmmakers had cleaned up and so downplayed the character’s back story that one could easily confuse him and his wife Mary with Nick and Nora Charles of Thin Man fame. Boyle, who had done time in prison for crimes committed to feed a substance abuse habit, intended him as a cat burglar and jewel thief, whose crimes often serve to right injustices. He saw the police as often corrupt and the prison system as unfair and cruel. Blackie was a figure in the Boston underworld who did time in San Quentin and moved his operation to San Francisco. The novel, a cobbled together set of short stories from Red Book, have a hardboiled edge tempered with some sentimentality and overwrought prose that would be at home in a Dickens story. We Americans love to make heroes of our bad guys, but we also like to sand down their rough edges. By the time the movies got him, Blackie was a wise-cracking amateur detective and his cops comic foils. Nevertheless, Blackie had an almost forty-year run in popular culture, testimony to the endurance of the formula.… (more)