SUNDAY July 5, 1992
Saint Mudd: A Novel of Gangsters and Saints.
By Steve Thayer. Viking. 387pp. $21.
By John Hampel
Unpublished novels have a dark life of their own. They breathe, they sigh, they mutter, at times they shriek. And why not? They all have the blues.
My own parcel of unpublished baggage was prone to sighing, and then muttering, so incessantly at the last, that, after the final big yellow package came back from New York (with a shriek!), I was forced to do the job on my own.
This novel, “Saint Mudd,” was not a mutterer, it was a growling hellcat in a gunnysack, that, I can imagine, kept its author up more than one night with its screeching tires, rat-a-tat of Tommy guns, and its stench of Midwestern corruption—all the angst of 1930s St. Paul, Minn., struggling to evolve from a wide-open town thick with gangsters and molls to a modern city of relative law and order.
Ultimately, this novel was forced to the same fate as my own. Steve Thayer had to publish the book himself after being rejected by more than 40 publishers. But the cycle has at last come ‘round; Viking has—four years after—decided to publish “Saint Mudd” as a brand-new book. What hadn’t they seen in it before?
Quite a lot. The book is a historical novel, beginning in the autumn of 1933 and ending a year later. Its hero is Grover Mudd, a reporter for a dying newspaper in corrupt St. Paul, where gangsters, we learn, very quickly, can do things in the street normal law-abiding folks wouldn’t think of trying:
“If you have a hankering for guns, laundered money, fast cars, faster women, moonshine, dope, prostitution, protection, gambling, and a theater of changing seasons, come to St. Paul, Minnesota. Nestled above and behind a sweep of high, white sandstone bluffs on the Mississippi River is a magical little city where” one can do just about anything.
If, of course, one is a gangster. And so many of them have come here: John Dillinger, Babyface Nelson, Alvin Karpis, Freddie Barker (son of Ma), and many lesser scourges. Thayer gives them life, speech, and sometimes a motive for their banditry.
It is primarily Mudd’s life that we follow through its gritty encounters in the not-so-underworld of St. Paul as he and his newspaper take on a crusade to rid the city of its crime wave. Just about everyone is on the take, from the cops on the beat to wealthy nabobs in the statehouse. His newspaper is about to be absorbed by another St. Paul daily, readership is declining, and the decision is to go hell-bent for indictments.
Mudd is not one to pull punches in his writing (nor is Thayer), and some prominent gangsters he has called to the fore decide to even the score their own way. This plays out as you might expect, with gunfights and getaways, along with often touching struggles of Grover (Saint) Mudd—quite dubiously canonized by the author—to sort out his own troubled life, and some deftly sketched minor characters who pass wretchedly through the streets of old St. Paul.
In the end, this is a story of St. Paul the city, dubiously canonized itself, which started out, we learn, as a settlement whose most prominent citizen was a bootlegger named Pig’ Eye, at a place on the Mississippi River known as Pig’s Eye Landing.
The wild adolescent town it grew into becomes a real character in this novel, with each street in the story named and every landmark described to the least detail.
In a book so rife with history, perhaps a telling of why humble St. Paul would have become such a haven for Midwestern mobsters might have been interesting and informative. But even proceeding from the status quo, “Saint Mudd” succeeds, at once raw-boned and unflinching, and yet tender as the vast Minnesota night.
John Hampel, a Franklin writer, published his novel, “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” last year.