Stick Your Neck Out in Boston And See What Happens

THE STRANGLER

By William Landay

Delacorte. 390 pp. $24

Between June 1962 and January 1964, the killer who became known as the Boston Strangler murdered at least 11 women, some of whom he also raped. The city was gripped by fear. Locks, guard dogs and all manner of weapons flew out of stores. Women refused to go out at night or to open their doors. A massive police investigation was launched, thousands of suspects were grilled and a psychic was brought in, but these efforts turned up no evidence and caused bitter criticism of the police. Much remained unclear about the crimes. The police thought 11 women probably had been killed by the same man, but the news media added other victims. Most of the early victims were older women -- did the Strangler hate his mother? -- but some of the later ones were young. The women apparently let the killer in, which caused speculation that he was a repairman or even a policeman.

The resolution of the case was as ambiguous as the crimes had been. Albert DeSalvo, an inmate in the Bridgewater State Hospital, told his lawyer, the ambitious young F. Lee Bailey, that he was the Strangler. DeSalvo was at the time undergoing psychiatric tests after being arrested for unrelated rapes. Bailey negotiated a deal whereby DeSalvo told investigators what he knew about the murders -- and he seemed to have knowledge of the crime scenes -- but only after he was given immunity from prosecution. DeSalvo was thus never convicted of the Strangler killings but was sentenced to life in prison for the rapes. In 1973 another prisoner stabbed him to death. To this day, some students of the case think DeSalvo was not the Strangler, but it is a fact that, once he was behind bars, the Strangler-style killings stopped.

Lawyer and novelist William Landay uses this grim history as background for his second novel, but he also tells a bigger story of crime and corruption. If I read him correctly, he's saying that, yes, someone was strangling these women, but at the same time crooked cops, vicious mobsters, greedy businessmen and compliant politicians were strangling a great American city. It's an ambitious novel that centers on the three Daley brothers: Joe, a troubled cop; Michael, a Boston city lawyer who's assigned to the Strangler case; and Ricky, a dapper jewel thief. Their father, also a Boston police officer, has been killed in the line of duty, and their widowed mother is being wooed by her late husband's fellow detective and best friend. In one of the novel's plot lines, the brothers suspect that the friend may have killed their father.

By the time the story begins, DeSalvo is in custody, but many questions remain about the Strangler case. When a woman close to the Daley family becomes the victim of a Strangler-style murder, it raises the question of whether the real Strangler is still at large. Or was the woman, a reporter, killed because she had dug too deeply into corruption and mob influence in the city's vast urban renewal program?

Landay does a good job of turning over the rock to reveal the dark side of a city that we often think of in terms of its educational and cultural glories. The mob is vividly portrayed, from the seldom-seen boss of bosses to a crazed thug called Vincent "the Animal" Gargano, who, in one of the novel's strongest segments, forces Joe Daley, the cop, to go to work for the mob. Joe, who's not terribly bright, is a gambler who finds himself owing $20,000 (twice his annual salary) to mob-controlled loan sharks, and Gargano makes it clear that if he can't pay up, he'll either take orders from the mob or be killed. Joe sinks deeper and deeper into the quicksand of corruption until even he realizes he's doomed.

As the story unfolds, the question becomes whether the brothers can find out who killed their father and the young woman before the mob kills some or all of them. At least one Strangler-style killer, who's very much at large, also figures in the story -- in one harrowing scene, he sets out to rape the brothers' widowed mother.

As this suggests, there's some ugly violence in the story. There also are interesting digressions on everything from lock-picking to migraine headaches, from the mysteries of religion to the difficulties of love. ("But love for Ricky was a behavior, a series of actions. The emotion itself was worthless, because it's internal and immaterial. Even at its intensest and most intoxicating . . . it could only be enjoyed by the one who felt it, not by the partner who inspired it.")

This is, finally, genre fiction, but of a high order. In the end, one of the brothers must perform some Rambo-style heroics to put things right, and a dying man must stay alive just long enough to gasp out a much-needed confession. Because Landay is writing about crime in working-class Boston, some reviewers have compared him to Dennis Lehane. That calls for clarification. "The Strangler" is superior to Lehane's early Kenzie-Gennaro novels, but it does not equal the rich prose and intense characterization of his "Mystic River." Still, it's an impressive and satisfying performance, and Landay is a writer to watch.