Gatsby's Bootlegging Background

The sensational title of Karen Abbott's book delivers on its promise of telling the extraordinary story of notorious bootlegger George Remus and his equally extravagant wife Imogene. Both were law-breakers, first with regard to Prohibition and later with regard to murder: piquantly, Imogene hired a hit man who failed at killing George, while George fatally shot Imogene personally and up close, in full view of multiple witnesses at the eponymous Eden Park in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 6 October 1927.

An extraordinary amount of research underlies this book of historical nonfiction that reads amazingly like a novel. The 5,500-page transcript of Remus's murder trial serves as the main historical record but certainly is not the only one. The fifty-seven pages of notes at the end of the incredible tale serve as evidence for Abbott's assertion that her account includes "no invented dialogue" (xv). A wealth of historical figures also appears in this book, sometimes in detail and at other times as fleeting references to evoke the spectacular period of the Jazz Age.

This insistent emphasis on the book's identity as history renders conspicuous its many reviews that reference F. Scott Fitzgerald and particularly Jay Gatsby, both of whom are cited in Abbott's opening pages (ix) and also in the privileged space on the back cover, where George Remus is identified as the real-life version of the fictional Gatsby. In blurbs on the back cover, we are told that the book is "the nonfiction answer to The Great Gatsby," that it "feels like a Gatsby-era novel," and that it is "Gatsby-era noir at its finest." These references indicate that readers of this historical narrative will inevitably recognize its relationship to Fitzgerald's novel of the Jazz Age.

However, for all Abbott's insistence on her book as history, she also tellingly reveals that she sees Remus's adventures through the lens of The Great Gatsby. Her epigraph to the book cites the famous lines describing Jay Gatsby springing "from his Platonic conception of himself" and then going about "the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" (ix; GGVar 118)—a description equally true of Remus. Even more telling are her titles for each of the three parts into which the book is divided, all of which derive from Nick Carraway's observations: "The Pursued and the Pursuing," "Careless People," and "The Colossal Vitality of His Illusion."

Critics and historians have long identified George Remus as one possible model for Jay Gatsby. Abbott typically refuses this comparison, although she notes that Remus was a notorious figure long before Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby—the so-called Bourbon King's murder of his wife postdates the novel by two years, of course—and that Remus might have served as one of many inspirations (30). It is easy to locate references online to Fitzgerald having met Remus. In 2015, Roy Hotchkiss of the Price Hill Historical Society described an apocryphal photograph picturing "Remus surrounded by the police chief, Al Capone, and Fitzgerald, all in laughter" (qtd. in Beall). Provocatively, Abbott has it both ways in a 2019 interview in Smithsonian Magazine publicizing Eden Park, first asserting that "there are these impossible stories that Remus and Fitzgerald met [at the Seelbach Hotel, which is mentioned in Gatsby (GGVar 28)] when Fitzgerald was stationed in Louisville," and then equivocating, "I don't necessarily think they are true" (qtd. in Serratore; emphasis added).

The deep historical foundation of Abbott's book disguises certain fictional elements, notably the inclusion of the thoughts of Remus, Imogene, and other figures. More important is Abbott's underlying identification of history with absolute truth, not recognizing that received history is itself always a narrative, a version of a story privileged with the dubious label "true." An instructive counterpoint is William Kennedy's 1975 historical novel Legs, which recounts the life of Jack "Legs" Diamond, still another bootlegger of the 1920s. The first...