Frank Buck: Chicago Hitman by Joseph G Peterson

There’s something compelling about hitmen, whether the first one you think of is Leon, Martin Blank, Jason Bourne, or any of the other bad, flawed but ultimately rivetingly cool antiheroes of page and screen. Joseph G Peterson’s latest novel introduces the reader to a hitman who manages to be compelling while being anything but cool, an achievement not to be sniffed at.

Frank Buck is fat. Very fat. He has a litany of physical ailments that qualify him for disability benefits. He loved Rubik’s cubes as a boy and worked for 25 years as a database developer. Following the collapse of the industry he worked in and his consequent redundancy, Frank finds himself jobless, reliant on gambling and Svedka vodka to while away his time, aged 48 and living with his beloved ma, a widow with a mild addiction to the Gems Network that strains the pair’s available funds.

But Frank possesses a prodigious gift. Ever since he was a little boy, he could shoot. No matter the weapon, if it fires projectiles, Frank can use it with a preternatural precision. This talent, combined with a chance – or maybe not – meeting with a local gangster called Rodger, plunges Frank into the Chicago underworld as the psychopathic Rodger’s number one hired gun.

Acting out of a sense of duty to his mother, a need for funds and the tragic fact that nobody other than his parents ever seem to have appreciated him like Rodger does, Frank relates a series of graphic, grotesque and often senseless, murders, always capped by Rodger taking gleeful polaroids of the corpses.

The violence is outlandish, extreme and repetitive in its outlandish extremity, which could be too much for some, but that, I think, is at least partly the point. The reader gets pushed so that they have little choice but to question the fact that over the course of the novel they’ve found images of death to be shocking, entertaining, but ultimately a little tedious. Imaginatively, we get inured to a world that is corrupt, thoughtless and sadistic, which is a comment on the tragic nature of Frank’s life and a hint at how close all of us might be to moral turpitude.

Ultimately, this is a novel that successfully broaches the line between pulp fiction trope and social critique, and that manages to involve us in a character who is at the same time surreally fictional and poignantly relatable. When you combine that with the striking sense of place that Peterson evokes of his native Chicago, and a supporting cast of vividly drawn gangland ghouls, there’s a lot to like about Frank Buck: Chicago Hitman.