After 25 years and almost as many books about sports, Richard Whittingham needed a change, a nobler and more gratifying subject. Like so many other Chicago writers, he turned to crime.
“That’s where my heart and soul are now,” says Whittingham, the author of two novels about Chicago’s seamier precincts, the latest of which is “Their Kind of Town” (Donald I. Fine).
The “Their” in Whittingham’s title refers to the cops, reporters, grifters, bimbos, mob capos and enforcers who not only make up the cast of his novel but also populate (or overpopulate) so much of the noir fiction written by Chicagoans.
Whittingham had read enough crime novels to know he was moving into congested territory when he published his first crime novel, “State Street,” three years ago. But he figured he had gone about as far as he could as a free-lance writer (and ghost writer) of sports books.
He got off to a fast start as a writer in 1979, with an illustrated history of the Bears that made the Tribune best-seller list. In short order, he was typecast as an author of coffee-table sports books, compiling a series on NFL teams: the Giants, the Redskins, the Cowboys.
A historian as well as a reporter, Whittingham logged as many hours in musty archives as in locker rooms and stadiums, producing such books as “What a Game They Played,” a collection of interviews with Red Grange, Sid Luckman, and other Hall of Famers.
Switching fields, he collaborated on biographical works with Joe DiMaggio and Jimmy Piersall, an adventure in clashing personalities, Whittingham recalls. The voluble Piersall was an open book, he says, willing to talk about any subject, under any circumstances.
“I showed up at his house for the second interview to find him lying on a couch in the family room, stark naked, an ice pack on his groin,” Whittingham says. “He’d gotten hit that morning with a tennis ball. He was in some pain, but wanted to go ahead with the interview anyway.”
DiMaggio, legendary for his reticence in and out of the ballpark, almost always wore a coat and tie, Whittingham says. “He would not talk about anything personal. It was written into my contract that Marilyn Monroe’s name couldn’t be brought up.”
Although such assignments were lively and rewarding, Whittingham grew increasingly impatient to tell his own stories and not simply serve as a ventriloquist for sports figures.
He had developed a real taste for crime when he took a sabbatical from sports to write “Joe D: On the Street With a Chicago Homicide Cop,” a tour of duty with Joe DiLeonardi, who was briefly police superintendent during Jane Byrne’s regime.
Riding in a patrol car with Joe D was both instructive and inspirational, Whittingham says. He drew on the experience when he wrote “State Street,” which Richard Martins, in his Tribune review, called “a top-flight detective novel as raw as life on the city’s wintry streets.”
“Their Kind of Town” is similarly raw, a police and underworld procedural that begins with two gangland murders: A bystander is shot when he accidentally witnesses an execution. After the killings, Whittingham briskly shuttles between the forces of law and disorder, with glimpses into the inner workings of the police and the Outfit.
As in “State Street,” Chicago is not just the backdrop but a central character in the novel, a dominant physical presence. A 55-year-old native of the North Side, Whittingham says, “I wanted to chronicle the city as thoroughly as Joseph Wambaugh has done with Los Angeles and William Cauntiz with New York.”
Following up on his travels with Joe D, Whittingham was diligent in his research, cruising the streets with homicide cops, hanging around squad rooms, checking out the morgue. It was not so simple to get a fix on the mobsters, who figure in half the novel. “Mainly, I had to talk to the cops who’ve dealt with them. You don’t go directly to them for your research, not in Chicago.”
———-
Richard Whittingham will sign copies of “Their Kind of Town” from 4 to 6 p.m. Oct. 8 at Bookman’s Alley, 1712 Sherman Ave., Evanston.
