ALL LOST, SAVE HONOR

By John Skow

Eugene Izzi wrote pretty good detective stories. So they say. But he was never in the same class--business class, with every suit in every seat in every 747 out of O'Hare reading the same paperback--as John Grisham or Robert B. Parker. This reviewer never happened to read any of the 16 Izzi novels listed on the op-title page of his last thriller, A Matter of Honor (Avon; 424 pages; $24). A lot of other people didn't either.

It's hard to say now with any real assurance, but it may be that this galling half success, the insult of being known but not well known, may have been too much for a prideful man. Last Dec. 7, some time after A Matter of Honor had been sent to the publisher--and been accepted--Izzi's body, wearing a bullet-proof vest, was found hanging outside the window of his 14th-floor office above Chicago's Loop. The rope slip-knotted around the corpse's neck passed back through the window, and was tied to the leg of a desk. On the floor was a loaded revolver. A hole, as if from a struggle, was bashed in one plasterboard office wall, but the office was locked from the inside.

A baffling murder? Or an elaborate, self-mocking suicide, with the locked-room angle thrown in to ensure prime-time coverage? Or could Izzi, a writer known to be fanatical about research, have been trying to find out how it felt to dangle by the neck outside an office window? In his pockets, besides a can of Mace, several hundred dollars in cash and a set of brass knuckles, were three computer disks. It has been reported that although the disks don't add up to a book and are unlikely to be published, they describe a scene almost exactly like that of the author's death--right down to the pistol and the holed wall--in which white racist militia members hang a detective-story writer outside his office window. The difference is that on the disks the hero climbs back up the rope and evens up matters with the pistol. In real life, however, dead is dead (and puzzles sometimes lack answers, though a medical examiner ruled that the writer's last chapter was a suicide).

But Izzi's tangle of fiction and reality does not end there. A Matter of Honor threads an intricate and somewhat overstuffed story of two detectives, partners, one black, one white, through the sweltering heat and gathering racial tensions of a deadly Chicago summer. The novel works as a kind of Venality Fair--it's a shade better than pretty good--mainly because even the author's minor characters--sleazy black gang bangers and brain-fried white neo-Nazis--are expertly sketched. And the two detectives are well drawn, without much Butch-and-Sundance romanticizing. They like and respect each other, yet there is a gulf between them that is not race prejudice but simply an unbridgeably different racial experience. Ellis, who's black, puts his career on the line for his white colleague Marshall, for instance, but never tells him his worst fear, which is that his teenage son will turn into a street punk.

Vivid as parts of the narration are, the novel is flawed by the extent to which it depends for its impact on barely disguised real people and events. A central event that sets off rioting in the novel is the shooting of a black homeless man by a white off-duty cop who was leaving a gin mill with his black girlfriend. A very similar shooting, by a white cop named Gregory Becker, actually occurred two summers ago in Chicago. When the state's attorney was slow to indict, homeless advocates launched weeks of demonstrations and press conferences, in which U.S. Congressman and former alderman Bobby Rush, a onetime deputy minister of defense for the Black Panthers, played a prominent part. So it goes in the novel, in which an activist alderman, with ambitions to run for Congress, is called Billy Charge. (The real-life Becker was eventually indicted for involuntary manslaughter, armed violence and official misconduct, and went on trial April 9.)

There are other not very deep disguises in the novel: a black gang leader named Crocodile Berkley sounds a lot like Wallace ("Gator") Bradley, a onetime enforcer for Larry Hoover, the imprisoned head of the Gangster Disciples. And an ominous and all powerful "Minister Africaan" might be mistaken for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Although Farrakhan, it should be said, has no known political hold on Congressman Rush, as Africaan does over Billy Charge. Chicago insiders may amuse themselves by identifying other caricatures. But the teasing roman a clef scam of borrowing real, recognizable people and making them speak invented lines blurs reality and weakens fiction. True, emperors and presidents can palaver in historical novels, which are understood to be imaginings. And one or two real personages in the crowd scenes of a contemporary novel hurt nothing. But disguised public figures with speaking parts are hobbled; they can't really say or do much beyond what is known about them from the evening news. And that's the trouble with Izzi's thriller: it softens like the flab of docudrama.