Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher

The book is an account of Eliot Ness as safety director (police and fire) for the city of Cleveland. Why much was made of the serial killer in the title and some reviews is a bit of hyperbole of sorts. Ness was not the lead detective nor were the crimes ever solved. My subjective feeling is that 95% of this book was NOT about the serial killings. It’s a good book about Eliot Ness, an apparently fine man, but if your interest is in the serial killings I’d suggest you find a different book.

I agree with reviewer Mark Allen. The book contains little about the Mad Butcher. We don’t even know who he is even though it is suspected to be Doctor Francis Edward Sweeney. I started to skim over parts of the book when I got tired of reading about Eliot Ness’s role in stamping out crime in Cleveland. I became more interested when the authors discussed Oscar Fraley’s book on The Untouchables and the debut of the 1959 television series of the same name which I remember very well.

Excellent review of the times and of the man.

In their last joint outing, “Scarface and the Untouchable,” Max Allan Collins and Brad Schwartz undid decades of venal revisionism by hack writers and deranged academics to restore the reputation of Eliot Ness. They also did a fantastic job of humanizing Al Capone without painting him as a jovial meatball who only gave orders. That book was well-sourced, layered and smart and it fully succeeded at making Prohibition and its biggest events and personalities come alive. Collins and Schwartz do much the same here with this exploration of Eliot Ness’ later career in Cleveland (a town possibly dirtier than Chicago), his pursuit of the Torso Killer, and finally, his wayward final years in the private sector. An ungodly amount of research went into this book, and overall, the period detail and narrative are nicely balanced without one overwhelming the other. Imagine if a traditional 900-page history book was edited down and touched up by Mickey Spillane — that’s the feel of this book. And that is a fantastic thing. Although there are a few diversions that probably could have been trimmed, historical crime enthusiasts like me (and you, if you are reading this review), won’t mind the extra detail. After all, Max Allan Collins has been writing historical crime fiction set in Cleveland and Chicago, often featuring Eliot Ness, for the last 30 years. He knows this world like no one else alive; the man has probably been pouring over microfiche copies of the Chicago Tribune and Cleveland Press from the 1920’s and 1930’s for most of his career. It was only a matter of time until he found a talented collaborator and ventured into non-fiction. If you are an existing fan of Max’s, it’s a given that you’ve already purchased a copy, so there’s no need to convince you further. If you are unfamiliar with these authors and enjoy the non-fiction work of Harold Schechter, Jason Lucky Morrow, or Erik Larson, then you will likewise love this book. Fans of novelists like James Elroy and Ed Brubaker should enjoy it, too.

Great read about Ness and his activities in Cleveland but the Torso Butcher is treated almost as an after thought. The author goes into great detail about Ness and corruption, raids, traffic violations, personal life and sometimes actually talks about the torso killings. There are better books on the Torso Murderer. But this is a great book on Ness — title was misleading.

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