The Red Scare Murders

This wry, big-hearted, noir brings 1950s New York to life from the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen to the mansions of Riverdale, from Sing Sing to City Hall, with a gripping murder mystery laying bare the explosive conflicts between its big wheels, its working stiffs, its gangsters, and its dreamers.

July 1950: Mick Mulligan has just hung out his shingle as a private investigator in New York’s sweaty Hell’s Kitchen. A former Hollywood cartoonist whose life fell apart when he was blacklisted during a communist witch hunt, Mick is broke, divorced, and in need of a paying gig to make his child support payments. But maybe not this gig. First off, it’s impossible. Worse, it’s liable to get him killed.

Last year, universally reviled cab company owner Irwin Johnson was murdered. One of his drivers, an African American Communist Party member named Harold Williams, was arrested, tried, and found guilty, despite scant evidence. Now his execution date is two weeks away. No one has come out to fight the miscarriage of justice—not the liberals, not the unions, not the Communists. New York City labor leader Duke Rogowski asks Mick to make one last effort on Harold’s behalf—can he find fresh evidence that might buy Harold a stay of execution?

Lots of people might have wanted Irwin Johnson dead—anyone from his cuckolded wife to his jilted mistresses’ jealous husbands to the mafiosi he was stealing business from or one of the workers he exploited—but no one has any reason to help Mick exonerate Harold Williams, and some of Irwin’s former associates are happy to take a blunt object to the head of anyone asking awkward questions. Yet Mick can’t abandon a potentially innocent man to the electric chair, and he agrees go to bat for a Negro Communist no one else wants anything to do with. Can he pull off a miracle?