What I Am Reading: "Mackerel by Moonlight" by William F. Weld

Bill Weld really wants to be Irish. That’s the only conclusion that I can draw from a book where he makes his main character an Irish version of himself and takes shots at the Yankee Governor of Massachusetts in the year 1996, who in the real world’s timeline was Weld himself. To compensate for his inability to have lived the life of Frank Skeffington in the magnum opus of Irish-American politics, The Last Hurrah, Weld wrote a book about an Irish Democrat running for DA in Boston.

This novel was his first, and it is a decent little political thriller. I thought going in that it was a comedy; it is written in the first-person with a funny narrator, so it was a natural mistake to make. The book is about Terry Mullally, a former federal prosecutor in New York who, after using shady means to convict some criminals and protect some friends, skips town to Boston to start a second career at a white-shoe law firm. From there, he is soon approached by some cops from the cross-state police network to run against the incumbent Suffolk County District Attorney in the Democratic primary. That DA, Marty Gross, is getting a little too big for his britches by meddling in police affairs. Mullally has a grand time gaining in the polls, attacking his opponent’s blunders, and making the right jokes at the right ritualized Boston Irish dinners.

Mullally is a card-carrying member of the law enforcement establishment, having been mentored by police ever since his father, a small-time criminal, was killed when he was young (the father’s criminal associations being obvious to the reader, but not Terry). As a character, he is resourceful, witty, and savvy about how the game is played, and Weld has multiple characters tell us that Terry lives his life in the present-tense. He may occasionally dwell on how he lost his father when he was young, but of course this only made him stronger, and more attentive, and gave him the drive to succeed. A bit of a rogue, in other words. Weld’s background as a U.S. Attorney (though in Massachusetts, not New York) comes through in multiple stories that Mullally tells his ruthless ace campaign manager, Lanny Green, about prosecutions that he had masterminded, so that these could be turned into fodder for the campaign messaging grist mill.

Despite being a relatively slim novel, the book covers a lot of ground, as it goes through Mullally’s entire DA campaign, his first two years in office, and his (spoiler alert: successful) campaign against the state’s incumbent Republican Senator, Harold Dellenbach, whom Weld has the central-Mass courtesy to place as a native of Gardner. Similarly, Weld’s love of the Quabbin, the subject of course of his third novel, is first glimpsed here, as he makes Mullally’s late father a refugee from the flooding of Dana. He also does the Ripton thing again, which is starting to annoy me.

The book has a good twist; we are aware of Mullally’s slightly sketchy backstory, and this rears its head when it seems that a loose word to his frenemy, the crooked NYC cop who got away, results in the death of the estranged husband of the high-society woman Mullally is courting. As he proceeds with his DA term and into the Senate race, we are ready for the axe to fall, but said descent ends up being a bit of a surprise. I’ve spoiled enough, but I will say that Mullally ends up a bit more of a Frank Underwood/Francis Urquhart than he is a Frank Skeffington. I am happy to report that the novel has a sequel.

One interesting and possibly problematic last note is the book’s constant use of Asians as antagonist figures. One of Mullally’s biggest prosecutions in New York (and thus an eventual campaign propaganda tale) was an undercover operation against Asian drug dealers; his girlfriend Emma’s absentee husband is from Hong Kong and is involved in organized crime there; Terry’s big break as DA involves catching low-level bank officials laundering money for Hong Kong organized crime figures trying to move cash before the handoff from Britain to China; and even a minor campaign scandal is caused by an illegal Korean bundler (similar to Al Gore’s Chinese bundler scandal in 1996), which Mullally and Green handle by returning all contributions given by people with Asian surnames. This, and the narrator’s world-weary cop opinions on LGBT people, mark the novel as being from a different, somewhat cringeworthy political generation. But, I wonder what sort of novels Bill Weld would be writing now, if he had stuck with it?