Funny Boys
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Even when murderous gangsters are shoving his head into a toilet, Mickey Fine can’t stop making jokes. He wants a career in comedy so badly that he takes a job as a Tummler, a comedian and host for a hotel in the Catskills; a hotel where he knows the very gangsters who abused him are staying. An already dangerous situation escalates when Mickey falls for Mutzie, the “number one girl†? of Pep who is arguably the most violent thug in the hotel. Betrayals and politics within the mob play out behind the scenes while Mutzie joins Mickey on stage and the pair inevitably find themselves marked for death. But Mickey is naive to the more sinister side of his audience made up of mobsters and other power players of New York’s underbelly. But as their circumstances start catching up with them and the body counts start mounting, Mickey and Mutzie start angling for a way out. That, of course, isn’t as easy as it sounds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set mostly in the Borscht Belt, Adler's satiric take on 1930s New York gangsters falls short of the mark set by such other novels of his as The War of the Roses. Mickey Fine, an itinerant entertainer known as a tumler, has landed a gig at a Catskill hotel frequented by some of the leading thugs of the day. He falls for Mutzie Feder, a frustrated young woman from Brooklyn who's ended up as the girlfriend of Pittsburgh Phil Strauss (aka Pep) after a makeover so she looks like Jean Harlow. As Fine's feelings for Mutzie grow, he runs afoul of the jealous Pep and must develop a plan to free her from the life of prostitution the gangster has planned for her. At times Adler overdoes the Brooklynese dialogue ("Certain tings make me crazy. Like sweet liddle canaries who can't keep der lips clamped shut"), while some readers may find the parodic element makes it hard to engage emotionally with the characters.
