Book Review: City Dogs

Book Review: 'City Dogs' by William Brashler

2 / 5 Stars

William Brashler was born in 1947 and grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He worked as a police reporter in North Chicago, and used this experience in composing ‘City Dogs.’ Of the fiction and nonfiction books Brashler published during the 1970s and 1980s, the best-known of these is ‘The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings,’ published in 1973 and made into a 1976 movie starring Billy Dee Williams.

‘City Dogs’ first was published in 1976 in hardback. This Signet paperback edition (217 pp.) was published in November, 1977. The cover artist is uncredited. 

The novel is set in Chicago in the Fall of 1969. The protagonist is a middle-aged wino, and former thief, named Harry Lumkowski. Harry spends his dissipated days getting drunk on cheap wine, snatching purses, breaking into the trunks of parked cars, and lying on thin mattresses in fleabag hotels.

Harry isn’t above getting sober if it means he can participate in a robbery that will leave him with more money than what he gets from his monthly unemployment check. So, Harry doesn’t object when two small-time punks, Jimmy Del Corso and Donald Ray Burl, decide to recruit him for what promises to be a lucrative job. 

The problem, is, Del Corso and Burl aren’t too bright, and even an alcoholic like Harry can see that there is a good likelihood of the heist going bad. But the Chicago Winter isn’t that far away, and Harry is willing to take a risk if it means an easier life during the long, cold months ahead…….. 

While ‘City Dogs’ is marketed as a crime novel, it is in fact an effort at the genre of American Realism. The plot is rather thin, and serves as a scaffold upon which the author can expound on the lives and troubles of his cast of characters. Brashler’s prose is unwaveringly hardboiled, with the similes and metaphors that are obligatory to that diction:

There were more men on the street now….looking up with faces that looked like the tops of cans that had been ripped open, eyes buried in the sockets, lips that hung and flapped for saliva.

The narrative emphasizes telling, rather than showing, and as a result, readers will need to endure lengthy internal monologues, and passages describing the internal torments and dilemmas, of the personages with whom Harry interacts. These passages become increasingly tedious as the novel unfolds.

I won’t disclose any spoilers, save to say that the characters in ‘City Dogs’ are not particularly likeable, and by the time I reached the final chapters, I was rather indifferent to their fates.

Summing up, ‘City Dogs’ is a middling effort at an urban noir novel. If you are fond of novels set on the mean streets of Chicago, then you may find it worthwhile, but those looking for exemplars of American Realism from the 1970s are directed to Richard Price’s 1974 novel ‘The Wanderers,’ or Vern E. Smith’ 1974 novel ‘The Jones Men’.