COIT TOWER

The killing of Harlan Winthrop is almost just a sidebar in this portrait of San Francisco in the tense early days of World War II.

Harlan Winthrop does indeed wind up dead very early on, his lifeless body found in the famous Coit Tower in front of a controversial mural featuring the graffiti “RoBerTo,” supposedly standing for Rome/Berlin/Tokyo. This clearly implicates Axis sympathizers, which launches a very secret investigation led by Tony Bosco, lawyer, former police commissioner, and go-to guy in all such matters. Tony teams up with Dennis Sullivan, a new and hunky hire, and, eventually, sassy Ruthie Adams. Winthrop, though a reactionary—he believed strongly that White Anglo-Saxons were the master race—was still respected; in fact, he was heading up the war bond drive in the city. What the reader learns early on is that he had a very kinky hidden private life. The war informs everything here in 1942. The internment of the Japanese is underway, and German and Italian citizens are suspected in many quarters. Communism (like socialism) is anathema to patriotic citizens, but now we have the embodiment of godless communism, Russia, on the side of the allies! There is also an episode with Tony driving down to Pescadero where his brother, Lorenzo, a priest, has Mexican immigrants in his parish who may be fifth columnists.

What really carries this book is the period atmosphere. The first thing that strikes the reader is how completely suffused the story is with Catholicism. Tony is an ardent Catholic (as are his Irish friends on the San Francisco Police Department), and so is his brother Enzo, of course. The Knights of Columbus is but one of many Catholic organizations that Tony belongs to. Issel is a San Francisco native and history professor emeritus at San Francisco State and has written a couple of scholarly books on Catholicism and politics in mid-20th-century San Francisco. To a bewildered reader, this nonetheless makes a lot of the book seem like gratuitous proselytizing and a bit wearying. But we like Tony anyway, almost as much as he loves his wife and his new Buick Century, “the banker’s hot rod.” Period fashions are lovingly described, as are Italian cuisine and various neighborhoods. On the downside, racism is rampant and casual, true to the times. Tony’s wife, backed by Catholic social thought, does persuade him that “Jap” is a crude and unacceptable term. And to his credit, Tony is not comfortable with the Japanese internment, and he uses his pull to see that a White and Japanese family is not broken apart—not by keeping them out of the camps but by making sure that the White wife joins her husband and daughter in them! Issel is a historian trying his hand at fiction, and it shows. Character exposition is often labored and dialogue stiff, reminiscent of Dragnet. But with the color and ambiance of Chinatown, it’s a wash.

Warts and all, this is escapist historical fiction that expertly renders its setting.