While the Getting is Good (2025 )
By Matt Riordan
Hyperion Avenue, 326 pages.
★★★★
While the Getting is Good is a new novel about the Depression era that builds off the now-common knowledge that Prohibition created more crime than it prevented. To its defenders a booze-free nation was supposed to reduce everything from domestic violence to drunk driving and impulse crime. Instead, it created bootleggers, peddlers of poisonous beverages, and illegal speakeasies. Organized crime syndicates arose, each seeking to control the rising demand for contraband alcohol. Even the murder rate went up, as mobs rubbed out rival gangs, cops, and whoever else got in the way.
Prohibition proved nearly impossible to enforce, especially in places like Michigan where Canadian booze was just a short boat ride away. The Mitten State is the setting of Matt Riordan's new novel. It's a tale with more anti-heroes and heroines than virtuous characters.
Eld(ridge) is a Detroit-based fishermen who plucks herring from Lake Huron. He is married to Maggie, an Irish American lass who is both practical and feisty. They have two children, “Doc” and Bea. Eld, a World War One vet, works hard and makes about $1400 a year, decent money back then until the Great Depression hits. Like all fishermen, what he makes isn't what he clears. Fuel costs, repairs, boat payments, groceries, and rent chew away at his income and dropping fish prices make it harder to stay afloat, as do Bea’s school uniforms and donations to the Catholic Church. It's a good year if Eld can pay off his debts and have a little left over.
What would you do if some guy named Leon presented you with a plan that lets you fish to fish and make big money at the same time? All Eld has to do is briefly dock his boat on Sanilac Island, eight miles offshore but on the Canadian side of the watery border with the United states, load cases of whiskey, cover them with his catch, drop off the whiskey at a warehouse, and sell the fish as he normally would.
The usual preference to “while the getting it's good,” is “get out....” It’s another way of saying “if it sounds too good to be true it's not.” Eld realizes this too late., but how do you say no to the high life? Eld gets drawn into dreams beyond his imagination: lobster dinners, Leon's flashy boss Mickey Solomon, rolls of cash, and his sister Georgia. Before you know it, Eld is recruiting his friends, bedding Georgia who is as exotic as Maggie is pragmatic, as is often the case with women who in the parlance of the day would be called “floozies.” Even Doc is attracted to the smuggling business, despite his father's warnings to stay away. Eld and his family are rubes in a (literally) deadly game. What do they know of the Purple Gang, Detroit's big-time crime syndicate that doesn't take kindly to encroachment on what it sees as its turf?
Both Eld and Doc “disappear,” seldom a good thing when dealing with organized crime. In Part II of the novel, the women take over. Maggie initially despises Georgia, but they bond when word reaches them that thugs have made inquiries, a veiled threat the experienced Georgia knows way better than Maggie. Besides, Georgia gets on really well with Bea. Violence stalks them and people die, but Maggie and Georgia pull their own disappearing act by vamoosing to Indiana, then Ohio. The ultimate plan is to head to California.
One of the delights of Riordan’s tale is that it continues to toss unexpected curves. We learn a lot of unexpected things about Maggie, including why she finds it easy to be malleable. She does whatever she thinks is necessary to support Bea; including joining a cult-like religious group, becoming an industrial inspector, and getting sucked into a scheme of her own.
I like historical novels, and enjoyed While the Getting is Good quite a lot. It does have weaknesses though. Riordan runs out of steam and leaves us with an ending that comes off as clichéd and contrived. Some might also find the book’s parallel structures too convenient to be believable. Maggie's transformation also stretches the imagination, as does a Return of the Native-like reappearance. That said, While the Getting is Good is a fine thriller and a goes-down-easy portrait of American working-class life in the early 1930s.
Rob Weir
PS: The Purple Gang was a real crime syndicate.
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