Les Roberts Writes Youngstown
Reviewed by Claudia Taller
When Les Roberts writes a novel, the neighborhoods, attitudes and history of the city become so entwined with the plot that to separate them, the book would not be the same. Roberts’ stories are often a study of how the place where a person grows up influences who that person becomes. The characters come alive and are believable and microcosmic even when they’re murderers and Mafia leaders.
The Strange Death of Father Candy, published by St. Martin’s Publishing Group in 2011, is set in Youngstown (a new twist for Roberts) and the main character is Dominick Candiotti, who returns to the Italian neighborhood where he grew up to attend the funeral mass of his brother, Father Richard Candiotti, priest at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Dominick would not have come back to his neighborhood without a good reason, and the fact that his brother, the good priest who everyone loved and admired, killed himself, gives him a reason to stay around after the funeral.
Les Roberts chose Youngstown as the setting for this book because “Youngstown is a smaller version of Cleveland — very rust-belt, very ethnic. The book is set in 1985 when they were still reeling from the steel mills closing down in 1977. Then — and now — the Italian mobs RUN Youngstown, which has always been considered ‘an open city,’ i.e. anything goes because you can probably get away with it.” When asked whether the book is based on a true story, the author said, “It isn’t exactly BASED on a true story, but it’s certainly inspired by one… When I heard the true story about a priest who supposedly committed suicide… the whole book came together in my head INSTANTLY.”
Milan Jacovich mystery series fans will find that Dominick is another character who thinks like we do, learns things as we learn them, and reacts to family issues and parental malfunctions as we would. Dominick’s experience of Youngstown and its creepy journey into dishevelment is not so different than what some of us felt when Euclid Avenue was full of empty storefronts (“Hillman Street jolted me even worse. Bad enough when it was daylight, at night it virtually screamed danger.”). This character seems a bit like a misfit as he trolls around Youngstown, but we soon find out the Vietnam War and childhood in the neighborhood gave him the fighting tools to protect himself from the mob and the mental acumen to solve mysteries.
Dominick gets squirrely answers to questions about his brother’s death, especially from the bishop of the Catholic Church, who says “No one understands God’s way except for God.” Everyone he talks to tells him to leave it alone and they have convinced themselves, at least on the surface, that Father Candy had some secrets and personal issues just like everyone else. Dominick knows Father Candy did not kill himself; someone killed him, and love of his brother drives him to solve the mystery.
We like the main character so we want him to solve the mystery. Roberts says, “The plot came to me all at once, sitting in front of the Catholic church in Youngstown in Jim McBride’s car as he told me the story. I didn’t really plan it all out ahead of time; I never do ‘outlines.’ But I knew from the start who the villain was, and, naturally, who the victim was. But I had to work out as I wrote HOW we would catch and punish the killer.” It seems there was no running away from this story, which is how most of Roberts’ stories come about. When I asked what was the most fun for him while he was writing the book, Roberts responded, “It’s more graphically erotic than most of my other books, so I had fun getting sleazy as I wrote. It’s also somewhat more violent than usual (for me), although compared to some great writers like James Lee Burke and Karin Slaughter, the violence and cruelty are mild.”
We also want Dominick to resolve his personal issues. He admits he doesn’t have a life when he says, “I can’t really say I have a passion for anything,” and the reporter Merle Leak responds, “That’s the saddest f___g thing I ever heard.” After beating up a couple of guys, we see his human underbelly when he admits, “It wasn’t until I got up in my room that I started to shake. If anyone knocked, I sure as hell couldn’t shoot them, because the two guns I owned were locked in a little safe in a closet of my house in Chicago.”
One of the first things anyone who meets Les Roberts will find out is how much he loves Cleveland, which is why his memoir is called We’ll Always Have Cleveland. He worked in Hollywood for years before coming to Cleveland to produce a show for the Ohio Lottery, and he fell in love with the city. “For all its big-city perks and activities and attractions—and scandals, too—Cleveland is a small town, or at least a medium-sized one broken up into many small neighborhoods,” Roberts writes. When he came to Cleveland, he had just sold his first novel An Infinite Number of Monkeys, featuring a Los Angeles private investigator, which won Best First Private Eye Novel of 1987. Because he embraces the city, he claims he runs into someone he knows almost every time he goes out of the house.
While Les never writes about his own life, we hear him in his books. In his memoir, he wrote, “If I ever feel the need to expose the darkest secrets of my life—and you can take a deep breath and hold it waiting for that to happen—I’ll write it as a novel instead, changing all the character names (to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent), and nobody will ever realize the lead character is me.”
Roberts received the Sherwood Anderson Literary Award and is the past president of Private Eye Writers of America and the American Crime Writer’s League. He loves people who write and likes to encourage new writers. As a critic, he’s a careful reader who’s good at spotting plotting and characterization errors and telling people what needs to be fixed. That’s who Les is. His one piece of advice to would-be writers is: “Don’t agonize over it, don’t worry about it, don’t get upset if your family or friends are shocked by it, and don’t talk about it endlessly to other people. JUST SHUT UP AND DO IT!”
Find out where and when Les will be signing copies of his books or talking to writers about writing by going to his website http://LesRoberts.com. For a weekend immersion in writing fiction, join Les and others at the Word Lovers Retreat in Lakeside the weekend of June 7-9, 2012.
Claudia Taller is the author of Ohio’s Lake Erie Wineries and has been a Cool Cleveland contributor for many years. She helps writers and other creative people discover possibilities for their lives through Igniting Possibilities events, including Word Lovers retreats. She has written articles for numerous publications over the last decade and blogs at http://ClaudiaTallerMusings.blogspot.com. Her book can be purchased at http://OhioLakeErieWineries.blogspot.com and makes a perfect gift for history buffs and wine lovers.