The Pope of Greenwich Village

It is one of my favorite books quite unexpectedly. Just a thoroughly well written caper about some hapless criminals.

I really like this book. I've re-read it several times because it is the type of story that takes you away from the problems of Life for a while. Charlie Moran is one those characters who is a study in contradictions. He wants to do what's right but gets talked into doing wrong; wants to dump the girl (Diane) but is forced toward a commitment which ultimately blows up in his face. Hard Luck and Charlie are no strangers, mainly because Hard Luck is personified as his cousin Paulie. I saw the movie to this book and it comes pretty close to the book. The casting was pretty accurate to the characters I pictured while reading the book. Part love-story, part New York hustlers, part Mafia...well detailed characters and a few good laughs. Read this one, you will enjoy it.

I stumbled onto this book in 1991, and I can't count how many times I've re-read it. The writing style is "open", uncluttered by stylistic fancy, so you see right through to the characters. You don't read this book . . . you watch and listen the people and events. It's so smooth and strong, I have always just assumed it was a successful, critically-acclaimed book. Never had any desire to see the movie, because this book (these people, these events) are so colorful and alive! I would think a film could only subtract from the story. You feel Charlie's frustration, without becoming claustrophic on the pages. You get properly irritated with Paulie, without wishing the author had used him less. Indeed, you come to enjoy every character -- corrupt and otherwise. As you near the end, you start to feel like these are friends or acquaintances. Always a disappointment to finish the book, and though the end is "fair", not a "cheat", one feels there might be room for a sequel of sorts. Okay, so it's not gonna challenge your paradigm of preconcieved non-subversive regendered sub-analytical postgrocery non-consciousness . . . but every reader deserves some FUN, right?

New York mob books are a dime a dozen but that doesn't mean they ain't fun. I'm telling you, man, that this is the funnest book you could hope to read in your lifetime. No farting around with belletristic descriptions, no long diatribes on "The Code of La Cosa Nostra"...just good-time lowlife fun. Regular shmucks trying to get a break for chrissakes. Paulie is absolutely adorable with his ineptitude and the villain "Bed Bug" Grant is a fearsome clown. Super book.

The characters you love to hate! Each one is deep. THe story grabs you and won't let go. Has this man written anything else?

I In the late seventies I spent a year working in the Apple as a restuarant manager in both the upper West Side and the Village. The manner alone in which Vincent Patrick describes the innumerable ways employees cheat and steal from an owner are accurate and, in this case, ideosynchractic enough to make a fellow laugh out loud. I certainly did.Working contracts on tables, getting orders without dupes, the con-jobs and tricky mannerisms required to do it all with aplomb are here. In the first twnenty pages I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes; and when I returned to work I kept my eyes peeled for some of the things I'd read about in the book but had as yet not known existed. Aside from how the book enriched my life in being able to thwart weasely waiters, dishonest cooks, extortionist vending machine reps and meat delivery men who said "Scale? Who needsa scale? You got my word on the weight, man. Hey, you like a trip to Miami with your girl, on me?" it has made me laugh for twenty years. There are, simply put, no better descriptions of psychopathic mobsters, eccentric safe-busters, or mental images of the many small-time criminals that live in and around Mahattan's underbelly.Honor, ethnic pigeonholing, and oral stories told by nearly every character as they are introduced. Some of these range in size from a paragraph to several pages, but each one is captivating in that it rings true to anyone who has spent a fair amount of time in Mahattan, as well as creating a mental picture of just how many devious ways there are to cheat, lie, steal, insure one's own demise and escape such fate by the skin of one's teeth.Over the years I've given away every copy of The Pope of Greenwhich Village, and not a single person has ever said anything but "Christ, whatta book!" People have seen the movie, which was pretty good, considering the inherent limitations of film when translating so rich and full a book as this. But the book, one of the finest and most accurate first novels I have ever read, continues to make me chuckle and remenisce about my own days as a young man trying to make a living in Manhattan. A world where everyone seemed to have an angle or insight that went way, way over my head.If you can find a copy of this book, hold onto it for years of enjoying characters so vivid in their charming dishonesty they will become friends.