Word: izzy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Eugene Izzi wrote pretty good detective stories. So they say. But he was never in the same class--business class, with every suit in every seat in every 747 out of O'Hare reading the same paperback--as John Grisham or Robert B. Parker. This reviewer never happened to read any of the 16 Izzi novels listed on the op-title page of his last thriller, A Matter of Honor (Avon; 424 pages; $24). A lot of other people didn't either...
...real assurance, but it may be that this galling half success, the insult of being known but not well known, may have been too much for a prideful man. Last Dec. 7, some time after A Matter of Honor had been sent to the publisher--and been accepted--Izzi's body, wearing a bullet-proof vest, was found hanging outside the window of his 14th-floor office above Chicago's Loop. The rope slip-knotted around the corpse's neck passed back through the window, and was tied to the leg of a desk. On the floor was a loaded...
...baffling murder? Or an elaborate, self-mocking suicide, with the locked-room angle thrown in to ensure prime-time coverage? Or could Izzi, a writer known to be fanatical about research, have been trying to find out how it felt to dangle by the neck outside an office window? In his pockets, besides a can of Mace, several hundred dollars in cash and a set of brass knuckles, were three computer disks. It has been reported that although the disks don't add up to a book and are unlikely to be published, they describe a scene almost exactly like...
...Izzi's tangle of fiction and reality does not end there. A Matter of Honor threads an intricate and somewhat overstuffed story of two detectives, partners, one black, one white, through the sweltering heat and gathering racial tensions of a deadly Chicago summer. The novel works as a kind of Venality Fair--it's a shade better than pretty good--mainly because even the author's minor characters--sleazy black gang bangers and brain-fried white neo-Nazis--are expertly sketched. And the two detectives are well drawn, without much Butch-and-Sundance romanticizing. They like and respect each other...
Angela delighted in baths when she was out of the ventilator and could splash freely. "We'd play the sound track to Grease at bath time," Izzi recalls. "She was smiling and laughing, and we'd dry her off and hold her a little while, just to get some human contact." She adored watching videos, especially Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. "She wasn't really into Barney," observes Izzi. A lollipop was a special treat: "She would stick her tongue out, and we would rub it against her tongue...