Mean Business on North Ganson Street

S. Craig Zahler is a terrific independent screenwriter and an accomplished novelist. His 2014 violent crime novel, Mean Business on North Ganson Street, was to be adapted into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx, but it seems the film project never happened.

Our hero is Jules Bettinger, age 50. He’s a tough and cynical black police detective in Arizona. For largely political reasons involving an unfortunate civilian death, he’s fired from his position on the force. His chief made some calls and landed him a job as a police detective in a rustbelt city called Victory, Missouri. The town is a cesspool of rapes, abductions and murders. They could use a seasoned detective.

Victory is a shithole among shitholes resembling Sin City from the Frank Miller comic books. Dangerous thugs wielding pipes are everywhere. The “Welcome to Victory” sign at the city limits is smeared with excrement greeting visitors with miles of dilapidated tenements and dead pigeons adorning every street.

Bettinger’s first case in Victory is a murder-rape (in that order) on Ganston Street, and the book starts looking like a normal police procedural. Not so fast! Zahler’s plotting takes two abrupt turns becoming an investigation into police corruption, then a violent serial killer manhunt.

Ganston Street’s characters are vivid and morally-ambiguous. Characters that stand on virtue are dragged into the muck when a case becomes personal. As a lead character, Bettinger is super-smart and capable. But the real star of the novel is the dungheap town of Victory. Zahler pours it on thick making Victory far-and-away the most putrid city in America — making Gary, Indiana look like Downtown Disney.

To enjoy a Zahler book, you need to be comfortable with an extreme amount of graphic violence. A rotting pigeon is shoved down the throat of a non-compliant subject. Brain matter splatters against the ceiling in an office suicide. All of this is in service if the plot and never gratuitous, but you need to make peace with these sequences as a reader. Some of the descriptions were hard to read.

The mysteries of the novel are all neatly resolved by the end with characters having gone to hell and back to bring these matters to a close. Mean Business on Ganson Street isn’t Zahler’s masterpiece (that would be The Slanted Gutter), but it’s a damn-fine xxxtreme police procedural mystery-crime-corruption-vendetta novel that will keep you glued to the pages. 

Get the book HERE.