A Leap of Faith or Two Will Get You Through 'The Fifth Floor'

Review of THE FIFTH FLOOR (Knopf 2008)
Author, Michael Harvey

No question about it Michael Harvey writes with edgy, wry style. THE FIFTH FLOOR is a well-paced story, delivered in clipped, yet highly evocative, prose. And the protagonist, private eye Michael Kelly, has a troubled past (something about a dead woman and getting kicked off the Chicago police force that Harvey may have covered in his first book, THE CHICAGO WAY) and makes all the pithy wisecracks we've come to expect from a guy of his ilk--coming on all tough on the outside, while retaining his essential humanity within.

Harvey also gives you a real feel for Chicago--the place, the people, the politics. (He even mentions The Billy Goat--the greasy spoon lampooned on Saturday Night Live in the "chee-burger, chee-burger" sketch.) The writing is so stylish and goes down so easy that you tend to forgive and forget if the plot gets a little, well, difficult to follow (or, frankly, to swallow).

Kelly is hired by Janet Woods, a woman from his past--they were once romantically involved, but that was long ago and she's married now to Johnny Woods, who's abusing her. Exactly what Janet is hiring Kelly to do is never really spelled out, but he gets her permission to approach Johnny and "talk some sense" into him (whatever that may mean).

So Kelly gets some preliminary intell--finds out Johnny works for the Fifth Floor (of the municipal building, where the mayor has his office) as a "fixer" (and we all know what shady characters those guys are). Kelly follows him to a house and makes a shocking discovery, which leads him to investigate whether the mayor's great grandfather (or maybe it was his great-great grandfather--someone way back there in the family tree) was involved in a conspiracy to start the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

What does this have to do with his client, Janet? Nothing that I could discern. She continues to live with Johnny and take his abuse. Worries that her daughter will end up being his next target. But Kelly is off and running anyway, investigating in land records and historical museums to get to the bottom of a murder that seems to be as much of a shock to Johnny as it is to Kelly . . . and this all helps Janet how? I just don't know.

Kelly's snooping gets the mayor's attention (because he is The Mayor of Chicago and knows all, sort of like Oz the Great and Powerful), and Kelly wonders if the mayor is running scared over word getting out that his ancestor may have caused the historic blaze. (A bit of a stretch, I thought--would the mayor really care? Given his obvious lack of personal involvement, would it really create such a huge scandal? But then, I'm from New York, not Chicago--you ask me, if it came out that the current mayor of The Big Apple's great-great-etc.-grandfather had been personally involved in setting up Tammany Hall, I doubt anyone in the city would blink an eye over it.)

Harvey's style has been compared to Raymond Chandler and rightly so. Like Chandler's work, the book's plot doesn't have to make perfect sense because, through the sheer power of excellent writing, Harvey takes you on such great ride.

One review has described the book's ending as "satisfying and out-of-left-field." I saw it coming a mile away. Some of it involves devices that are a bit too convenient (for instance, during his research, Kelly conveniently meets a young computer hacker who conveniently helps him get some convenient information for solving part of the mystery). What can I say? I still liked the book. Even if it did leave me asking, "Now, why is Kelly doing all this investigating? And how is it helping Janet?"