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Charlie and the Shawneetown Dame, based on a true story, recounts one of the most famous turf wars waged during the madness called Prohibition. The outsized ambition of Charlie Birger - a flamboyant, slightly mad Al Capone wannabe - brought him from New York to southern Illinois in search of fortune as a bootlegger. However, Birger soon found that his dream of grandeur faced a few hurdles - including the vicious Shelton Brothers and Helen Holbrook, a beautiful, alcoholic socialite from Shawneetown, whose simultaneous affairs with Birger and Carl Shelton fueled a bloody and bizarre gang war. Donald Bain vividly captures turbulent Southern Illinois during the Roaring Twenties, while deftly chronicling Birger's journey from charismatic leader to beleaguered general in the harsh reality of hand-to-hand combat, and ending with his demise as a dupe to a far cleverer enemy. Ultimately done in by the "Shawneetown Dame;" his own inflated ego; and by a sly sheriff named Pritchars, who conned Birger into jail, allowing the area's most famous gangster to bring his sub-machine gun into the cell with him - Charlie and his story are a fascinating piece of Americana - crude, violent, yet often humorous. Replete with homemade tank battles and crude bombings from an open cockpit aircraft, Bain himself considers this rapid, riveting read to be his best book.
In 1913 Charlie Birger began his career as a bootlegger, supplying southern Illinois with whiskey and beer. He was charismatic, with an easygoing manner and a cavalier generosity that made him popular. The stuff of legend, he was part monster, part Robin Hood. In the early days, he would emerge from his restaurant/saloon in tiny Ledford in Saline County with a cigar box full of coins and throw handfuls in the air for the children. Echoing the consensus on Birger, an anonymous gang member called him "enigmatic," noting that "he had a wonderful quality, a heart of gold. There in Harrisburg sometimes he'd support twelve or fifteen families, buy coal, groceries. . . . [But] he had cold eyes, a killer's eyes. He would kill you for something somebody else would punch you in the nose for." Drawing from the colorful cast of the living, the dead, and the soon-to-be-dead—a state shared by many associated with Birger and his enemies, the Shelton gang—DeNeal re-creates Prohibition-era southern Illinois. He depicts the fatal shootout between S. Glenn Young and Ora Thomas, the battle on the Herrin Masonic Temple lawn in which six were slain and the Ku Klux Klan crushed, and the wounding of Williamson County state's attorney Arlie O. Boswell. As the gang wars escalated and the roster of corpses lengthened, the gangsters embraced technology. The Sheltons bombed Birger's roadhouse, Shady Rest, from a single-engine airplane. Both Birger and the Sheltons used armored vehicles to intimidate their enemies, and the chatter of machine gun fire grew common. The gang wars ended with massive arrests, trials, and convictions of gangsters who once had seemed invincible. Charlie Birger was convicted of the murder of West City mayor Joe Adams and sentenced to death. On April 19, 1928, he stood on the gallows looking down on the large crowd that had come to see him die. "It's a beautiful world," Birger said softly as he prepared to leave it.
In Murder, He Wrote, Bain takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey from the rousing loops of Coffee, Tea or Me and the best selling comedy series it spawned to the gravity-defying biographies of Veronica Lake, legendary talk show king Long John Nebel, and top model and CIA mind-control subject Candy Jones; from the spectacular curves and twists of the wildly successful murder mystery novels based on the TV show "Murder, She Wrote" to the creaks and squeaks of one of the most bizarre gang wars in U.S. history, Charlie and the Shawneetown Dame.