Amateurs’ Hour

Marcus Sakey Shows That Crime is Best Left to the Pros

By John Hood

It sounded so simple. After all, they’d seen it done on screen a million times. Walk in, point a gun, grab the money, and leave. Even easier since there’d be two guns and a designated getaway driver. OK, so someone would have to be smacked to avoid suspicion. And they’d never done anything even remotely like this before. Still, how hard could it be? In and out in a matter of minutes. And living it up the rest of their lives.

Of course there’s no such thing as simple, not when it comes to knocking off somebody. Even a pro will tell you that. There are all sorts of unseen situations that can arise. Knocking off a player can be even less simple. So you better be braced for anything.

Fortunately for us, the foursome that comprises Marcus Sakey’s “The Amateurs” (Dutton, $25.95) aren’t braced nearly enough for the unseen situations that will befall them once they knock off a low level gangster with a safe full of loot. Hell, they aren’t even braced for what’s gonna go down while they’re doing it. Good thing too, ’cause if they were, we wouldn’t have anything close to this roaring story.

Here’s the set-up: A quartet of also-rans in the City of Big Shoulders meet each Thursday night over cocktails and commiserate about their less than glorious fates. Alex tends bar in the joint where they drink and seems stuck in his station. Same goes for Mitch, who took a temporary doorman job some years back and hasn’t looked forward since. Ian made one very right move on the trading floor and could’ve parlayed that into something, but he didn’t. And now he’s lucky if his gambling losses leave him money enough for an 8-ball. Then there’s Jenn, the travel agent who dreams of adventure while she arranges the adventures of others.

Bored yet? Don’t worry, they are too. Bored with their lives and boring each other to death. But even a Caspar Milquetoast would know that there’s no living unless one takes the plunge. So when Alex let’s slip that his boss Johnny Love is sitting on a stack of greenbacks and about to make some kinda drug deal, the “Ready, Go” game the gang likes to play becomes “Yes, Let’s.”

Yeah, there’s some hemming and hawing among the group before they decide to do the deed. And most of it comes from Mitch, for whom timidity might be an aspiration. But Mitch hates being left out of things too, despite a life of being just that. And he really digs Jenn. So when she and the other two say they’ll make the move with or without him, Mitch is in.

As you might suspect, he’s in way over his head; as are they all. And the best laid plan that the four amateurs devise becomes a kinda worst case scenario from a-to-fucking-z. More importantly, everything each and every one of them ever was or wanted to be gets called into question, kicked to the curb and crushed under the weight of consequence.   

Written with the kinda tension a tightrope walker must suffer as the balancing bar falls to the ground, and soaked with the kinda dread a chronic victim must feel as they stare down the barrel of loaded revolver, “The Amateurs” is like bitch-slapping the dream of a lifetime and then laughing about it later. No quarter is given. No remorse is granted. And no pitiful apologies are offered or accepted.

Since Sakey’s a high stylist of immense talents, it’s also the kinda character etching a Thompson or a Crumley would concoct, had they Algren’s adopted hometown to skew from. What makes us tick? What makes us true? What makes us bleed? And in the end, how far are you willing to go to redeem yourself?

Almost everyone in the world at one time or another has wondered what they would do given the chance to do something bold and inexplicable. This book puts somebody’s wondering to rest.

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