Chicago book review: David Mamet's first novel in 20 years is a real blast once you settle into its rhythms

The playwright and screenwriter returns to the novel with a prohibition-era thriller – and his dialogue proves as chewy as ever

Few writers wield italics in speech with quite the same poetic charge as David Mamet. Like smoking slugs from a Tommy gun they amply pepper the chewy dialogue of his new crime thriller, Chicago, the playwright and screenwriter’s first novel in two decades.

Chicago returns to the Windy City prohibition-era setting of the author’s screenplay for Brian De Palma’s elegant gangster noir The Untouchables. Those familiar with the labyrinthine thrillers Mamet has written and directed for Hollywood, such as House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, will also note the presence of another Mamet trademark – the elaborate, spider-web plot which, like his philosophic, rat-a-tat dialogue, can be hard-going. But Chicago is a real blast once you settle into its rhythms.

Mike Hodge is a former First World War fighter pilot and a reporter on the Chicago Tribune whose beat covers the rival sides of town governed by Al Capone and Dion O’Banion’s Irish mafia. “Jaded unto death”, “brash and unfeeling”, and prone to “idiosyncratic expressions of self-loathing”, Mike and his colleagues find solace in alcohol and hard-nosed persiflage. “Man bites dog is too interesting to be news,” is their editor’s laconic advice.

Mike is in love with Annie, an Irish Catholic of “shocking virginal beauty”, and when an assassin guns her down while they are in bed at Mike’s apartment, he falls into a well of grief, whiskey and opium. Mike’s guilt drives his thirst for revenge, which leads him into dealings with both Capone’s syndicate and the Irish, and as he gets closer to his man, the plot – involving an insurance fraud and the IRA – becomes ever harder to unpack.

The dialogue here, of course, is the main event, where consulting a seasoned cop becomes a metaphysical exchange: “‘The question is, then,’ Mike said, ‘what is evil?’ ‘Well, that is decided,’ Doyle said, ‘by the fellow holding the gun.’”

But Chicago also features some wonderful female characters, such as Peekaboo, the African American madam at the Ace of Spades bordello who relates horrifying accounts of racial violence: “The thing in those days was stump hanging. They would take and nail a man’s privates or, as we say, ‘dick and balls’ to a stump. Using, it came to hand, a rusty spike, a railroad spike...” The dazzling black aviator Bessie Coleman also makes an appearance and the novel has time for Mike to dispense with cynicism and reflect with a shot of lyricism on his wartime experiences.

“I don’t understand writer’s block,” an editor at the Tribune tells a reporter. “I’m sure it’s very high-toned and thrilling, like these other psychological complaints. I myself ... could never afford it.” At 70, and with a play about Harvey Weinstein in the works, Mamet still has plenty of lead left in the chamber.

‘Chicago’ by David Mamet is published by Custom House, £20