Word: charleye
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...Harrington has experience," said Harrington campaign consultant Charley Manning. "He has been a lawyer and prosecutor for 25 years, handling organized crime and political corruption...
...mouth out with whisky. Brunch can be avoided by not getting out of bed before noon on Sundays, but prequel -- ptui! -- probably is inevitable for works such as Richard Condon's rowdy new novel, a report on the formative years of the author's lovable but dumb Mafia assassin Charley Partanna...
Condon's book is not so stirring an achievement as to be inevitable, but it is cheerful and funny, and no effort should be made to avoid it. Charley, of course, is the hero of Prizzi's Honor, the 1982 Condon novel that Director John Huston turned into one of Jack Nicholson's better films. There Charley was seen at mid-life, and his crisis was that his wife (Kathleen Turner in the film) turned out to be not only a Mob hit woman but a boodler who tried to grab some Mafia loot. Wistfully but dutifully, Charley killed...
...novel precedes Honor by a few years and more or less explains Charley's problem: he is girl-simple, as his associates accurately put it. He could be content with living the good life as a respected professional man, blasting some slob with an assault rifle here, acing out several losers with cyanide grenades there, and studying hard for his high school diploma at night school, where he earns the respect of all and is voted secretary-treasurer of his class...
Complications ensue like crazy. One of them is a candidate for the New York City mayoralty, who made his pile in the TV tabernacle dodge. He is an outof- towner, really, who does not understand how things work in New York, and he wants to have Charley indicted for his sixth-to-last murder. Maerose, a more serious troublemaker, wants to take over her grandfather's operation. As usual with the author's recent entertainments, the fact that none of this makes much sense becomes a literary metaphor on the order of Melville's white whale, implying as it does...