The copy I read is a reprint of the original, unavailable for a number of years. My experience with Lawrence Shames has been the much more comic novels; although, Bert the Shirt - the retired mafioso who died is an important part of the action here. His trip to New Yaak after more than ten years of tropical warmth will strike maky Floridians as the equivalen of a descent into hell. One whom I know has no shoes with toes so people cannot make her visit during winter. Perhaps Bert is as close as Shames comes to the humor of his later books. This is a more serious but not heavy handed analysis of the biographer's art.
Arty, a newspaperman and friend of the "Godfather's" illegitimate son is tempted into assisting with an autobiography. In it the old man will tell all. But the rub is that he tells the philosophy of his life: discrimination, self protection, racisim, authority, omerta, the need for something of one's own. Arty is getting nowhere, but becomes everyone's target. Meanwhile he becomes closer to the family and "the family."Everyone else, Vincente's other son, the mafia, the FBI all think the book is a naming of names and the chaos that results reaches the point of murder. Still there is a resolution of sorts: not a happy ending but at least ajust ending. It is a very different book from Welcome to Paradise , for example, but still an enjoyable discovery. Shames would probably do better if he left out his attempts to spell out New York accents. But aside from that, a good Key West read.