Tag Archives: City Of Danger

COLOSSAL FAILURE: ALCOHOL PROHIBITION & THE WAR ON DRUGS

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” said Albert Einstein. Such can apply to two enormous social experiments costing trillions in U.S. dollars and countless American lives. Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and the 50-year losing streak against “drugs”—the new Public Enemy Number One—flat-out never worked. Is it finally time to admit colossal failure, give up, and legalize all intoxicating substances?

I ask this question seriously. I’m one of the few people my age who’s never done “drugs”, not so much as a puff off a joint. However, I’ve downed enough booze to drown a humpback. And as I look back at 65 years of life, I’d be a hypocrite to sit here with my glass of Pinot Gris or Cab Sav and call down a pot smoker.

What got me going on legalizing drugs is a new writing/content-creating project I’m into. City Of Danger is my netstream-style series and I’m in deep research mode. The series core—it’s theme, you could call it—is “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. It’s a juxtaposition between the Roaring Twenties when Prohibition was in full swing and the Fizzling 2020s when society has succumbed to crime and corruption. Watch for the pilot episode in late fall/early winter.

The City Of Danger series is a social comment. It features two 1920s-era private detectives transposed in time to help a modern city in crisis dispense street justice and restore social order. And isn’t that exactly what alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs was supposed to do?

Before we come to my personal opinion and conclusion about legalizing all intoxicating substances, let’s look back on how Prohibition and the War On Drugs came to be and why they colossally failed.

The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

“The Eighteenth Amendment (Amendment XVIII) of the United States Constitution established the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. The amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and was ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919. The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty-first Amendment on December 5, 1933. It is the only amendment to be repealed.

The Eighteenth Amendment was the product of decades of efforts by the temperance movement, which held that a ban on the sale of alcohol would ameliorate poverty and other societal issues. The Eighteenth Amendment declared the production, transport, and sale of intoxicating liquors illegal, though it did not outlaw the actual consumption of alcohol. Shortly after the amendment was ratified, Congress passed the Volstead Act to provide for the federal enforcement of Prohibition. The Volstead Act declared that liquor, wine, and beer all qualified as intoxicating liquors and were therefore prohibited. Under the terms of the Eighteenth Amendment, Prohibition began on January 17, 1920, one year after the amendment was ratified.

Although the Eighteenth Amendment led to a minor decline in alcohol consumption in the United States, nationwide enforcement of Prohibition proved difficult, particularly in cities. Rum-running (bootlegging) and speakeasies (booze cans) became popular in many areas. Public sentiment began to turn against Prohibition during the 1920s, and 1932 Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt called for its repeal. The Twenty-first Amendment finally did repeal the Eighteenth in 1933, making the Eighteenth Amendment the only one so far to be repealed in its entirety.” ~Wikipedia Quote

The Eighteenth Amendment wording is:

Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all the territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Prohibition of alcohol didn’t happen overnight in America. The temperance movement had been building for several hundred years and was a strong social divide across gender, race, ethnic origin, religion, and class status; ie wealth and power. The social division before 1920 when Prohibition was enacted and enforced was severe. In one camp were the “drys” who opposed all alcohol forms. In the other were the “wets” who saw nothing wrong with drinking’s status quo.

Then there were the moderates who believed in alcohol tolerance with strings attached to safely regulate the booze business. A 1784 treatise titled The Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind argued in favor of limited medicinal alcohol use and controlling excess by educating society on the dangers of overindulgence. The report labeled drunkenness as a disease to be controlled and treated, not an offense to be prohibited and punished.

Those views changed over the century and a half while the temperance movement gained traction. Middle-class women earned enormous clout as moral authorities in the household. Most believed alcohol was a threat to the home and, in many cases, they were right.

A conflict of values between rural Protestant America and the liberal urbanites emerged and this turned political. Votes being votes, the temperance and prohibitive forces seized on the sentiment of the day, and the Eighteenth Amendment became law.

Despite the Volstead Act authorizing  federal, state, and local authorities, there was little law enforcement will to stop the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States. With government out of the picture, or at best, sitting on the sidelines, civilian forces took control of the alcoholic beverage industry and profited—profiting enormously is an understatement.

Prohibition caused the mobster/gangster culture complete with turf wars and assassinations by Tommygun. Gangsters thrived while they were alive and the public starved from the loss of legitimate employment in the liquor business and the drop in tax revenues. Cities like Chicago and New York partied with thousands of illegal speakeasies which the local police turned a blind eye to, and the feds—the revenuers—had horribly inadequate resources to do anything but chase hillbilly moonshiners and bust the odd still.

Then came Black Friday and the start of the Great Depression which bled into the Dirty Thirties. Crime had won and the temperates lost. Public opinion turned and shaped new prohibition policies which basically said, “We’ve lost the black market battle. The intoxicant war can’t be won. It’s time to make alcohol legal again.”  The move towards repealing the Eighteenth Amendment took hold.

— — —

When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened, and crime has increased to a level never seen before.      ~John D. Rockefeller in open 1932 letter to the New York Times

— — —

The Twenty-First Amendment of the United States Constitution

“The Twenty-first Amendment (Amendment XXI) to the United States Constitution repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had mandated nationwide prohibition on alcohol. The Twenty-first Amendment was proposed by the 72nd Congress on February 20, 1933, and was ratified by the requisite number of states on December 5, 1933. It is unique among the 27 amendments of the U.S. Constitution for being the only one to repeal a prior amendment, as well as being the only amendment to have been ratified by state ratifying conventions.

The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on January 16, 1919, the result of years of advocacy by the temperance movement. The subsequent passage of the Volstead Act established federal enforcement of the nationwide prohibition on alcohol. As many Americans continued to drink despite the amendment, Prohibition gave rise to a profitable black market for alcohol, fueling the rise of organized crime. Throughout the 1920s, Americans increasingly came to see Prohibition as unenforceable, and a movement to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment grew until the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified in 1933.

Section 1 of the Twenty-first Amendment expressly repeals the Eighteenth Amendment. Section 2 bans the importation of alcohol into states and territories that have laws prohibiting the importation or consumption of alcohol. Several states continued to be “dry states” in the years after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, but in 1966 the last dry state (Mississippi) legalized the consumption of alcohol. Nonetheless, several states continue to closely regulate the distribution of alcohol. Many states delegate their power to ban the importation of alcohol to counties and municipalities, and there are numerous dry communities throughout the United States. Section 2 has occasionally arisen as an issue in Supreme Court cases that touch on the Commerce Clause.”  ~Wikipedia Quote

The Twenty-First Amendment wording is:

Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.

Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.

Prohibition lasted thirteen years before America came to its senses and legally regulated the production and distribution of properly-produced alcoholic beverages. The U.S. Constitution turned over all alcoholic regulation and enforcement to the state and local levels, where it should be, with the local demographic values setting the intoxicating substance standard.

A lot of people prospered during Prohibition. A lot of people suffered during Prohibition. And the anti-alcohol social experiment colossally failed. But today, there’s no appreciable black market in the booze biz that legitimately generates a colossal tax base paid for by a fairly peaceable drinking crowd.

The War On Drugs

What did Albert Einstein say? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Boy, you’da think they learned. But, nope, by 1971 America had Richard Nixon and Tricky Dick need a cause to help keep his job. The war on drugs broke out.

“The war on drugs was a global campaign led by the U.S. federal government of drug prohibition, military aid, and military intervention, with the aim of reducing the illegal drug trade in the United States. The initiative includes a set of drug policies that are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of psychoactive drugs that the participating governments and the UN have made illegal. The term was popularized by the media shortly after a press conference given on June 18, 1971, by President Richard Nixon—the day after publication of a special message from President Nixon to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control—during which he declared drug abuse “public enemy number one”.

That message to the Congress included text about devoting more federal resources to the “prevention of new addicts, and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted”, but that part did not receive the same public attention as the term “war on drugs”. However, two years prior to this, Nixon had formally declared a “war on drugs” that would be directed toward eradication, interdiction, and incarceration.[14] In 2015, the Drug Policy Alliance, which advocates for an end to the War on Drugs, estimated that the United States spends $51 billion annually on these initiatives, and in 2021, after 50 years of the drug war, others have estimated that the US has spent a cumulative $1 trillion on it.

On May 13, 2009, Gil Kerlikowske—the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)—signaled that the Obama administration did not plan to significantly alter drug enforcement policy, but also that the administration would not use the term “War on Drugs”, because Kerlikowske considers the term to be “counter-productive”. ONDCP’s view is that “drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated… making drugs more available will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe”.

In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report on the War on Drugs, declaring: “The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.” The report was criticized by organizations that oppose a general legalization of drugs.” ~Wikipedia Quote

“Drugs” is an all-encompassing term. You can successfully argue alcohol is a drug and it is. However, alcohol is a much more socially acceptable intoxicant than the evil ones like heroin, cocaine, PCP, methamphetamine and the deadly synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Marijuana is in a class of its own. In my three decades in the police and coroner service, I never saw anyone violent while high on weed, and I never found anyone dead from a THC overdose.

Illicit drugs have been floating around America for a long, long time. Indigenous folk used hallucinogenics like peyote and mescaline for religious insight and recreational fun. Morphine treated wounded soldiers in the Civil War, the Two World Wars, and Vietnam—some soldiers became severely addicted to this opium-based product.

The 1890 Sears Roebuck catalog offered a gram of cocaine and a small syringe for a buck and a half. At that time, cocaine was still legal and it made Coca-Cola a light, refreshing drink. Marijuana? The hemp industry flourished in the south and was a clear and present danger to the cotton industry. Cannabis plants were outlawed, but not because of THC intoxication. It was purely a financial and political move to save the cotton plantations, blaming it on the slaves who needed to be protected from smoking the buds to kick back.

Successive U.S. presidencies bought into the war on drugs movement. Perhaps that was because it became too big to stop. Ford, Carter, Regan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama all threw massive money and military on the dope fire. Trump? Well, who knows what went on in that man’s mind. But it seems the new Oval Office manager is toning it right down when it comes to cracking down on crack.

Unlike the war on alcohol, which was fought on home turf, America took its war on drugs abroad. Foreign and domestic drug policy put enormous funds into eradication efforts in Mexico, Central America, and South America. Despite invading Panama to overthrow a drug-dealing dictator and chasing the cartels to the ends of the jungle, the drug flow into the United States never stopped.

At home, the jails filled with American citizens serving harsh time for non-violent, rather minor drug offenses. The southern border received a half-built wall that served no tactical purpose. And the inner-cities rang with gunshots, mostly aimed at visible minorities.

The 2011 Global Commission on Drug Policy report was right. The global war on drugs had failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world. And a new approach, the National Prevention Strategy, set a framework towards preventing drug abuse and promoting healthy lives.

Why Did Alcohol Prohibition and The War On Drugs Colossally Fail?

Human nature. There’s something in human physiology and psychology that craves intoxicating substances. Always has been. Always will be.

There’s an insatiable demand from people who want to alter their state of consciousness. Call it getting drunk, high, stoned, or just a little buzzed. Where there’s a demand for a consumer product, there’ll always be a supplier.

Prohibiting alcohol and criminalizing drugs removed the supply chain from the safe and taxable regulation structure and fed it to the wild-west black market. Like the Tommygun gangsters of the Roaring Twenties, the AK47-toting cartels of today took the mean streets of America into their control and the American politicians facilitated it.

How to Solve the Substance Abuse Problem?

You can’t. You can only try to control it as much as possible. That’s by reducing the demand, especially of the hard-core toxins. Alcohol is a done deal. It’s the norm in North American society and here to stay for good. Cannabis is nearly there with only a few hold-outs on legalizing recreational THC.

I’m all for both, provided the alcohol and cannabis products are clean, safe, and dispensed so they’re not too easy for kids to get at.

Natural products like powdered cocaine (not crack) and heroin are candidates to be pharmaceutically released on a prescription-based system. I’m okay with that as the demand will move from the street to the stores and can work alongside controlled addiction recovery programs.

Synthetic opiates are a different story. Pain killers like fentanyl and its super-deadly sister carfentanil are extremely addictive and relatively easy to produce by the underworld. In concentrated form, and when mixed with other hard drugs, synthetic opiates are a scourge—a plague—causing unacceptable numbers of overdose deaths.

The only solution here is a free government-run dispensary and removing the profits from gangsters. It’s not going to be politically popular, but if societies want to get tough on drug-related crime, they have to make a change in the supply system and then slowly bring down the demand.

That leaves to a blended bag of others drug intoxicants. I can’t make a case for opening up the bottle containing LSD, crystal meth, speed, and ketamine. There’s no medical argument made for consuming these psychotic-causing poisons.

So there you have it. My conclusion—a tiered approach to controlling intoxicating substances is the most workable method of maximizing public health and minimizing criminal profits. Control the supply. Remove the criminal incentive. Clean it up and carefully release it while working long-term to curb the demand.

Remember what Einstein said. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

In the meantime, keep firing war-on-drugs bullets at the heads of low-life, black-market crack, meth, and street-grade fentanyl dealers.

WHY HARDBOILED DETECTIVE FICTION REMAINS SO POPULAR

The old-fashioned private detective with hardboiled ways has been around since the 1920s. He/she’s still here a hundred years later and shows no sign of going away. There are good reasons—many good reasons—for hardboiled detective fiction’s popularity, but one seems to stand above the rest. That’s escapism. You can safely escape into the fictional, fast-moving, danger-filled crime world and let your hardboiled detective kill your enemies for you.

This post is timely for me as a crime writer. I’ve recently taken the plunge onto the mean streets of hardboiled fiction writing after a coincidental brush with the film industry. I was going about my way putting out based-on-true-crime books in a planned 12-part series when I got an unsolicited call from a New York City film producer. It was about a historic serial murder case I’d worked on and published an article about.

Google being Google, the film producer found me and we had a nice long chat about the true crime case. He’d done his homework before our Zoom call and was somewhat familiar with my books. Being the diligent and always-on-the-look film producer that he is, he asked the 64,000-dollar question, “So what else you got going?”

What I had on the go—in the back of my mind for the last few years—was a concept for a hardboiled crime fiction series based on the 1920s style but set in the 2020s. I said, “Here’s the logline. A modern city in dystopian crisis surreptitiously enlists two private detectives from its utopian past to dispense street justice and restore social order.”

There was a long pause before he said, “Reeeeally… This is exactly what my colleague at (leading net-stream provider) is looking for. Can we set up a joint talk?”

Not being one to look the proverbial gift-horse in the mouth, I readily agreed. Now, I’m on a full-time mission to figure out how to do this and get something in place by the fall. Regardless if this ever gets “Green Lit” in film, I’m retaining the ebook, print, and audio rights to the series titled City Of Danger.

I’ve researched hardboiled detective fiction for the past three months. It’s utterly consumed me, and I’m completely hooked on a fascinating genre. I’ve always believed that the best way to learn something is by writing on it or, better yet, teaching it. With that in mind, a month ago I wrote a post on The Kill Zone about hardboiled crime fiction’s popularity. Now, I’ll steal back my own work and republish the piece here on DyingWords. Here goes:

—   —   —

Crime doesn’t pay, so they say. Well, whoever “they” are, they aren’t in touch with today’s entertainment market because crime—true and fiction—in books, audio, television, film, or net-streaming, is a highly popular commodity. One solid crime writing sub-genre, detective fiction, is hot as a Mexican’s lunch.

Detective fiction has been hot for a long, long time. Crime writing historians give Edgar Allan Poe credit for siring the first modern detective story. Back in 1841, Poe penned Murders In The Rue Morgue (set in Paris), and it was a smash hit in Graham’s Magazine. Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin, used an investigation style called “ratiocination” which means a process of exact thinking.

Poe’s style brought on the cozy mysteries, aka The Golden Era of Crime Fiction of the 1920s. Detectives like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple solved locked-room crimes. They intrigued readers but spared them gruesome details like extreme violence, hardcore sex, and graphic killings.

The golden crime-fiction genre evolved into the hardboiled detective fiction movement, circa 1930s-1950s. Crime writers like Dashiell Hammett gave us the Continental Op and Sam Spade. Raymond Chandler brought Philip Marlowe to life. Carroll John Daly convincingly conceived Race Williams. And Mickey Spillane, bless his multi-million-selling soul, left Mike Hammer as his legacy.

The ’60s to 2000s gave more great detective fiction stories. Anyone heard of Elmore Leonard? How about Sarah Paretsky and Sue Grafton? Or, in current times, Michael Connelly, Megan Abbott, and a wildcard in the hardboiled and noir department, Christa Faust?

These storytellers broke ground that’s still being tilled by great fictional detectives. Television gave us Perry Mason, Ironside, Columbo, Jack Friday, Kojack, and Magnum. Murder She Wrote? How cool was mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher? And let’s not even get into big screen and the now runaway net-stream stuff.

So why the unending popularity of detective fiction? I asked myself this question to understand and appreciate the detective fiction part of the crime story genre. I worked as a real detective for decades, and I know what it’s like to stare down a barrel and scrape up a cold one. But once I reinvented myself as a crime writer, I had to learn a new trade.

I’m on an even-newer venture right now, and that’s developing a net-streaming style series. It’s a different—but not too different—delve into hardboiled detective fiction, and the series is titled City Of Danger. To write this credibly, and with honor to heritage, I’ve plunged into a rabbit hole of research that’s becoming more like a badger den or a viper pit.

What I’m doing, as we “speak”, is learning this sub-genre of crime writing—hardboiled detective fiction—and I’ve learned two things. One, I found out I knew SFA almost nothing about this fascinating fictional world that’s entertained many millions of detective fiction fans for well over a hundred years. Two, detective fiction has far from gone away.

My take? Detective fiction—hardboiled, softboiled, over-easy, scrambled, or baked in a cake—is on the rise and will continue being a huge crime-paying moneymaker in coming years. There are reasons for that, why detective fiction remains so popular, and I think I’ve found some.

I stumbled on an interesting article at a site called Beemgee.com. Its title Why is Crime Fiction So Popular? caught my attention, so I copied and pasted it onto a Word.doc and dissected it. Here’s the nuts, bolts, and screws of what it says.

Crime fascinates people, and detectives (for the most part) work on solving crimes. But the crime genre popularity has little to do with the crime, per se. It has far more to do with the very essence of storytelling—people are hardwired to listen to stories, especially crime stories.

Detective fiction is premiere crime storytelling and clearly exhibits one of the fundamental rules of storytelling: cause and effect. In detective fiction, every scene must be justified—each plot event must have a raison d’etre within the story because the reader perceives every scene as the potential cause of a forthcoming effect.

Picture a Roman arch bridge. Every stone is held in place by its neighbor just like story archs with properly set scenes. Take away one scene that doesn’t support the story arch and the structure fails.

Well-written detective fiction has a bridge-like structure. Each scene in the storytelling trip has some sort of a cause that creates an effect. This subliminal action keeps readers turning pages.

The article drills into detective fiction cause and effect. It rightly says the universe has a law of cause and effect but we, as humans, can’t really see it in action. But we’re programmed to know it exists, so we naturally seek an agency—the active cause of any actions we perceive.

Detective fiction stories, like most storytelling types, provide a safety mechanism. A detective story is built around solving a crime by following clues. A cause. An effect. A cause. An effect. The story goes on until you find out whodunit and a well-told story leaves you with a satisfying end where you’ve picked up a take-away safety tip.

But detective fiction stories aren’t truly about whodunit. Sure, we want the crook caught and due justice served. However, we want to know something more. We want to know motive, and this is where the best detective fiction stories shine. They’re whydunnits.

Whydunnits are irresistible stories. They’re the search for truth, and in searching for truth in detective fiction storytelling—why this crime writing sub-genre remains so popular—I found another online article. Its title Why Is Detective Fiction So Popular? also caught my attention.

This short piece is on a blog by Swiss crime writer, Cristelle Comby. If you haven’t heard of Cristelle, I recommend you check her out. Her post has a quote that sums up why detective fiction is so popular, and it’s far more eloquent than anything I can write. Here’s a snippet:

“Detective novels do not demand emotional or intellectual involvement; they do not arouse one’s political opinions or exhaust one by its philosophical queries which may lead the reader towards self-analysis and exploration. They, at best, require a sense of vicarious participation and this is easy to give. Most readers identify themselves with the hero and share his adventures and sense of discovery.

Cristelle Comby

The concept of a hero in a detective story is different from that of a hero in any other kind of fictional work. A hero in a novel is the protagonist; things happen to him. His character grows or develops and it is his relationship to others which is important. In a detective story, there is no place for a hero of this kind. The person who is important is the detective and it is the way he fits the pieces of the puzzle together which arouses interest. Thus in a detective story it is the narration and the events which are overwhelmingly important, the growth of character is immaterial. What the detective story has to offer is suspense. It satisfies the most primitive element responsible for the development of story-telling, the element of curiosity, the desire to know why and how.

Detective stories offer suspense, a sense of vicarious satisfaction, and they also offer escape from the fears and worries and the stress and strain of everyday life. Many people who would rather stay away from intellectually ‘heavy’ books find it hard to resist these. Detective fiction is so popular because the story moves with speed.”

As a former detective, and now someone who writes this stuff, I think detective fiction is so popular because you can safely escape into a dark & dangerous world of wild causes and wild effects—full of fast-reading suspense—and you get powerful insight into what makes other people (like good guys and bad girls) tick. Yes, escapism. You can safely escape into the fictional, danger-filled crime world and let your hardboiled detective kill your enemies for you.

So that’s what went up on The Kill Zone blog. Now for a little bonus here at DyingWords. Here’s the City Of Danger series product description:

The City Of Danger is in peril. It’s in 2020s dystopian crisis with infrastructure crumbling, social systems collapsing, corruption infesting all civic layers, and crime overflowing from clogged gutters of every alley—gushing gangland and political blood onto its streets. The City Of Danger urgently needs help it can’t get from its mainstream. For salvation, it surreptitiously enlists two private detectives from its 1920s utopian past.

Susan Silverii and Al Monagham share a split-room office with frosted glass doors in the city’s low rent district. They’re ex-police officers who weren’t a good fit. It’s the Roaring Twenties, and they’ve struck out on their own. Al with his street justice vengeance. Susan with her social change agenda.

And they have a past, Susan and Al. A past of personal passion and poisoned positions. But when the City of Danger assigns, they put professionalism first and inter-conflict second as Susan Silverii and Al Monagham step from runnin’-wild, Charleston-dance speakeasies onto the mean streets in the ugly world of a modern city—an interconnected city sick with immoral chaos.

Dispense street justice. Restore social order. Treacherous tasks ordered by a desperate client— the City Of Danger.

Now for a double DyingWords bonus: Here’s a sneak peek at Scene One in the City Of Danger Pilot Episode:

CITY OF DANGER

Pilot Episode

Scene One

Monday, October 31 ­­- 7:50 a.m.

Setting:

Noir. Bleak. Dense urban. Icy drizzle has stopped. Civic lights are still on — what still work. Hard gusts blow wet leaves that stick to cracked brick, condemned structural glass, and corroded staircase metals. A failing foghorn on the waterfront echoes off battered buildings smothered by smog — its rhythm competes with sirens screeching hopelessly towards smoke, sickness, and sadness in the slums. Closing in — methane eerily seeps from open sewer grates. It nauseates. Yet, the taste is somehow sickly sweet — almost tolerable — and now expected; unapologetically not urbane, unlike those who fight entropy’s ultimatum in the City Of Danger.

Fade In:

Camera view:

Germanic Expressionist style. High-angle, downward capture. Sharp and dull shadows through contrasted lighting. Follows six feet back on quarter-rear sides as well as directly behind.

Narrator:

The City

Voice In:

A 2021 Beamer X3 SUV, deep-sea metallic blue, brakes to a halt behind a solid-black Tesla on Mean Street, a pock-marked route with water-filled potholes in the low rent district. A stunningly attractive and stylish high-status lady — exceptionally fit — a natural brunette, except for dyed umber highlights, showing dolphin-smooth skin — in her fifties with impeccable dark brows accenting mahogany eyes and classic red wine lipstick, steps out. Her Lululemon-clad legs hit hard on crumbling asphalt. Immediately, she clicks her fob and locks her doors then rapidly scans the streetscape. Her right hand subconsciously checks her shoulder-holstered .32 auto cloaked by her unzipped yellow & black Arc’teryx rain jacket, and she hurtfully limps into the claustrophobic narrows of Peril Alley.

On the lady’s left, angle-parked with one rear door propped open and its running engine spewing propane fumes, is a mid-2000s FedEx panel van parked beside a gold-trimmed 1999 Caddy Eldorado. A greaseball Latino takes a brown paper bag from the black F/X operator who glances at the lady with his one good eye. Twice and once more.

Further, on her right, the lady’s right, is an ‘85 Chevy Impala, a boring beige four-door with a flat front tire. A prune — a sun-wrinkled old olive-skinned guy with a faded white Masters golf cap and perpetually-down fly has it jacked-up. He curses the C-Word.

The lady pauses. She frowns. In Italian, she says, “Tua madre non ti ha insegnato le buone maniere”. He replies, “Ciao bella!” She blows a kiss at the ground, flips him the bird, and falters on. She quick-lefts a shoulder check then watches straight ahead, closing at the back end of a 1976 F150 Styleside, red and silver with a lichen-spattered canopy. A loosely attached, non-local plate catches her eye. Looks abandoned, she thinks. It’s at a chokepoint in the center of tightening Peril Alley. She stops. Slightly backs up. Sniffs. Nitrogen fertilizer with trigger device? No. Probably just organic sludge in the box of a stolen pickup dumped here as usual.

The lady squeezes past the Ford’s passenger side, avoiding its dented, dirt-dripping door and smashed mirror. She looks to her left at a late-60s muscle car, a puke-green Goat — a Pontiac GTO, idling with a leaded gas, throaty rumble. She can’t see the driver, but the Goat’s passenger is a mousey-haired hippy chick giving her a suggestive smile through a part-open window. The stink of shit-grade Sinsemilla scrunches the lady’s ideal nose.

Her right hand raises. Fingers pinch, then release, and her nostrils reopen after she’s passed — cautiously favoring her left side’s now-permanent short-step.

She hesitates. Stops. She looks up.

Chuck Berry’s hit Maybellene blasts from a transistor radio on a shaky fire escape landing. It’s thirty feet above her uncovered head, the same place invasive carrier pigeons roost and fecal-drop and terminally-diseased rats cunningly climb cone-shielded steel poles to steal mildewed barley seed scattered onto delaminating plywood.

The lady shivers. She keeps on.

On her right is an alley business, a family business she knows well, a WW2 era Chinese clothes cleaner and money launderer — Ho Lim’s — tucked into the set-back alcove of a used-brick façade with cast iron plumbing barely hanging from bolts set into breaking gray mortar. The lady moves to her left, avoiding intermittent blasts of perc solvent.

Peril Alley darkens. It cools even more. The buildings grow as she approaches dead end. Twenty stories and more overshadow brownstones and brownstones overshadow antiquated infrastructure of overloaded, overheated, overhead power poles draped with time-twisted lines strung through opaque glass insulators screwed into tired wood crossbars. On the ground — unpredictable ground — foundry-built catch basins guard root-filled, tiled storm drains that swirl-down rancid water mixed with more of the city’s rottenness.

Bang!

She spins left towards the sound. Lowers and goes sideways. Minimizes her silhouette exactly as she’s been tactically trained — intensely immersed during her now-discharged service — and hooks-out her handgun. But it’s the backfire from a red-as-raw-meat ’41 Packard 180 with a badly-floated carb. The owner, a flat-capper in elbow-patched tweed, laughs. She doesn’t. She reholsters. But leaves off her safety.

A bum, a Depression-era hobo with nothing more to her miserable life than a broken broom handle with a half-tied-on, once-gray pillowcase, rummages through an unlidded dumpster with her grease-crusted hands. The hag begs. The lady responds. She opens her overcoat, removes the Calabrian leather wallet handed down through her ‘Ndrangheta family, opens it, and gives the other a five.

Ahead — just before Peril’s dead-end — phonograph sounds of Charleston dance sing-out from inside a welded steel gate guarding a Prohibition speakeasy. It’s trailing off from last night’s steamy start, raucous non-stop laughter, and this morning’s explosive finish. The lady looks right. She smiles, slightly, at the flickering on-and-off red and orange and green and blue neon sign: Topper’s Grill & Bar.

The lady stands where she can go no more down Peril Alley. There’s a large door framed into a soot-stained, rough stucco wall Tommygunned with .45 holes. It’s flanked by a now-glassless window boarded-up after the latest kerosene-wicked, flame-thrown cocktail. The door is a heavy, metal-strapped oak door — not altruistic like her eyes and her soul — more fatalistic as a mix of splintered hardwood and oozing rust. Like her, risking to be shot once again.

Beside the door are two signs, business signs, in black & white Roaring Twenties font. One’s above the other. Al Monagham Private Detective Agency is on top. The other, below, is Susan Silverii Private Detective Agency.

The lady fishes a skeleton key from her outer garment — it’s now changed from her unzipped yellow & black Arc’teryx rain jacket to a peach Flapper coat (virgin wool, of course, and a color perfectly coordinating her stunningly attractive and stylish high-status Flapper headdress). She inserts the key with her right hand — her left hand and forearm so severely injured — they’re nearly impotent — and releases the lock.

She opens the door, and Susan Silverii struggles her step into temporary safety within her shared office workspace.

Fade Out.