Does your summer reading list include an old fashioned “hard-boiled” murder mystery? Con Lehane’s The Red Scare Murders (Soho Crime, 2025) might be just the thing. Start with a private eye who’s down on his luck. Add some gangsters, a mysterious woman whose intent is unknown, FBI informants, and lots of beers, shots, and cigarettes. You know the drill. It’s a familiar genre of the American detective story. Lehane’s book is set in the tumult of the immediate post-World War II labor movement — where the mob and members of the Communist Party (CP) are jostling for control of a New York City taxi drivers union.
Mick Mulligan is our gumshoe. He’s a son of the Bronx, recently returned from Los Angeles, where he was blacklisted as a cartoonist by Disney after a labor dispute in Hollywood. He’s lost his wife and daughter and he’s headed back to New York to try his hand as a private investigator.
It’s 1950 and the labor movement, after a quick round of successful post-war strikes, is reeling from the employer counter offensive: The Taft-Hartley Act has weakened unions, and the Cold War is off and running. Senator Joseph McCarthy has just made his first speech alleging communist infiltration of the State Department. And the CIO — rival labor federation to the AFL — is in the process of purging known Communist Party members or sympathizers.
Mick’s not a card carrying Communist, but he’s a “fellow traveler”— someone sympathetic with the aims of the Party — which wasn’t that unusual at the time. CP members were crucial to the rise of the CIO. And many Americans viewed the Soviet Union as the crucial partner in the defeat of Hitler. Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes are still six years in the future. But the political mood of the country is tilting towards the right, and labor is particularly vulnerable.
Mick’s first client as a private investigator is a New York taxi drivers union, where an internal struggle is being waged by communists and elements of organized crime. There are over 30,000 taxi drivers in New York at the time, but organizing them is a challenge, even in the most unionized city in the country. “Hacks” depend on tips to supplement their meager base pay, and much of the time they work in isolation from their fellow drivers. The industry is changing. More workers are now independent contractors, or “owner operators” rather than drivers for the large fleet companies. What is the basis for their solidarity in a labor dispute? Will owner-operators scab on a strike by the cabbies who work for the large employers?
One of the union’s militants, an African-American communist, is about to be executed for the murder of an employer. The leader of the union thinks it’s a frame job, and hires Mick to look for new evidence that might stop the execution.
And here, Mick’s investigation takes us on a narrative tour of New York’s neighborhoods. Up to Harlem, over to Queens. To picket lines, and to Greek diners. For a former New Yorker like myself, the local settings and historical details help make this an enjoyable read. Mick takes a secretary on a date to Schrafft’s. He hangs out in Hell’s Kitchen bars. He buys his suits at Robert Hall, and he smokes a lot of Luckeys (Lucky Strike cigarettes). What could go wrong?
Well, who done it? Was it the mob, or was it maybe someone within the Communist Party who had it in for Harold Williams, the man on Death Row? Mick has to navigate the mob, the CP, the employers (who are sometimes mobbed up), and a bevy of characters with mixed motives and shaky alibis. Is the CP organizer on the up and up? Can you believe the beautiful widow of the murdered employer? And what about the good-looking bar girl who flirted with him? Before finding the answer to who murdered the taxi company owner, Mick takes a few shots — at the local bars, and on the side of the head — on picket lines and in back alleys.
Con Lehane spins his tale using the tried and true masculine vernacular of the hard-boiled genre. But he’s convincing because he knows New York, and he knows the history of the labor movement. We don’t have many other books in this vein. The closest might be Gordon DeMarco’s series of Riley Kovachs books, set in San Francisco. Lehane’s prose might not be as original as his hard-boiled predecessors’, but he is in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald — leftwingers all. It makes for a fun summer time read in the backyard hammock.
Marcus Widenor is a former labor organizer and associate professor emeritus at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center.
