Summer Dreams

It’s the boom before the bust, the celebration to end all celebrations after the war to end all wars. It’s 1927 and the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, is in full swing. The horrors of the war have been left behind and the future is bright with promise. Prohibition is the law of the land, and also the cause of great lawlessness. Imagine the blare of a trumpet, the wailing of a sax or clarinet. Open to the rush of Mezz Mezzrow riffing hipster rhyming slang. Picture the speakeasies, flappers whirling about the dance floor, the rat-a-tat of a Tommy gun in the distance. Think Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat; Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler; Red Grange, the Wheaton Iceman. The list seems to stretch on forever: George Gershwin, William Faulkner, Georgia O’Keefe, Duke Ellington, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is the world of Ken Burwell’s novel Capone, the Cobbs, and Me.

The main character and teller of the tale is Mort Hart, a Jewish catcher for the Chicago White Sox. Mort, who is temporarily out of action with a knee injury, now does a bit of behind the scenes work for Judge Landis, baseball’s commissioner, who is charged after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 with cleaning up the game. Mort’s name is well chosen, evoking that of Moss Hart, a prominent Depression era writer. In point of fact Mort is a stand-in for Moe Berg, an actual player from the twenties. Though he was never a star at the highest level in his own right, Berg is a storied figure and a wonderful choice to base a character on. Like his real life counterpart, Mort is a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School. The flesh and blood Mort was, in addition, fluent in eleven languages, one them Japanese. That led to his serving as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services, OSS—the forerunner of the CIA. This was before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of a new, even more monstrous war. The twenties were a time of tremendous energy, but also a period fraught with social tensions and conflict. In parts of the country, the Klan was active (which Mort comments on) and racism and anti-Semitism were rife. To make matters worse, Berg’s signature bookish ways would have stood out and brought attention of a fairly unwelcome kind.

The other key characters are Al Capone, Scarface, the iconic mobster and reigning king of the gangland bootleg wars, and Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, the hyper-combative baseball immortal. Interestingly, the gang boss Capone comes across as an almost genial, if at the same time dangerous, master of ceremonies. By contrast, Cobb, nearing the end of his long career, is ever more menacing and makes a perfect antagonist for Mort and Capone to contend with. Which brings us to the other Cobb, Charlene—younger, talented, cultured and unhappily married.

The plot is simplicity itself and unspools at breakneck speed over a six-day stretch from July 2 through the 7th. It is the backstory, however, that generates the conflict and sets events in motion. The previous year, in 1926, Capone paid Cobb, then the player-manager of the Detroit Tigers, five thousand dollars to “frame,” that is fix a game against Mort’s White Sox. But as things transpire, thanks to a home plate umpire’s blown call, the wrong team, the favored Tigers, come out of the game the winner. It is probably an open question whether in its early days, say before the 1919 scandal, games were occasionally fixed. Certainly it is worth keeping in mind that before 1975, when the free agent era began, the economic basis of the sport was far different from what it later became. Most players needed off-season jobs in order to make do. Mort’s salary with the White Sox, he tells us, is six thousand dollars a year, though Cobb’s...