The Gorko Gazette

MURDERAPOLIS
ANTHONY NEIL SMITH
URBAN PIGS PRESS, 2025
500 pages, $12.99

In his new novel Murderapolis from Urban Pigs Press, author Anthony Neil Smith embarks on a whirligig tour of the regional drug gangs and homicide dick squads of the upper Midwest, specifically near his own stomping grounds in the down-at-the-heel sub-suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Somalian gangs have taken control of the streets and schools.

I say whirligig since the cast of the story number beyond what I can count on one hand, and are introduced in the book’s opening in a succession of dizzying chapters. I myself do not have the technical ability to pull this off without sounding like a chump, but the Professor Anthony Neil Smith sets up his pieces with skill, laying out clues like a croupier and building his characters across chapters, and once the characters are fleshed out moving them at will across the pages. It is an efficient and riveting setup, in a unique underground of Somalian second-generation gangsters, cops and civilians in a part of the world traditionally dominated by the white man. The author tips his hat to the BLM movement, which is perhaps justified given the killer cop reputation of his Twin Cities milieu. White people are mentioned only disparagingly, as the privileged class, which may be true to perspective from an all-black cast from Minnesota. To be honest, I have never been there, and this book did not have me rushing out to buy tickets.

Tightly sketched scenes of ghetto classrooms reminded me immediately of The Wire, Season 2. Gun violence, tons of gun violence, and literal karate roll off the pages like the Professor is just tossing back glasses of water. There is detailing, too, of brand tequilas, smokes and drugs, midwestern interiors, calibered repeaters, and the clink of the badge’s chain over the detective’s neck. Nor is there any mistaking the Professor’s tone, that this author has any abiding sympathy for his players. This prose jockey is just reporting the facts, ma’am, even when the characters themselves (poor boobies) spend pages embroiled in self-doubt and their own agonizing stupid dilemmas, fed into their fictional timeline with the cold objectivity of an engineer with a 3D printer and no hurry to leave the lab.

The tone is not hardboiled, but more like something out of the pages of Martin Amis:

Roble went to the most obvious place – a big box sporting goods store. The gun section employee eyed him warily. An older white man, wearing long sleeved flannel, Wrangler jeans. Some of the customers gave him the side-eye, too. All white men. Roble took a stroll around the glass cabinets, so many different types of handguns. Too much choice. -Murderapolis, Chapter 28

It may be that that is just the modern, midwestern setting. The dialogue, which drives a lot of the story, is realistic. The people are as miserable as the weather. My favorite character, Detective Mika, is on the crooked side of the law and our ticket to the party dens and crime scenes and machinations of the up-and-coming Shifta Murder Squad. The plot is unsurprising, though it is a little shocking how viciously some of the characters get fed through the wringer.

In short, if you are looking for a strange slice of genre fiction with tons of action and what I take to be the Professor’s own recommendations for top-shelf tequila, Murderapolis will take you where you want to go.

Get it here: MURDERAPOLIS

WHAT IS WE IS SERIES?

We Is Series is the new Gorko Club of Books Series of serious book reviews. We plan to review a new indie book a month, or per year, or maybe once a decade.

NO BUT WHAT IS IT

It is series, we are not joking around. The concept is to review new indie books, and to just give you the most honest impression we have got of them.

WHO WRITES IT

Me, Raddy. But if you want to, if you think you have a real honest take on a new indie book, and write words in a row, send queries raddywise to thegorkogazette@gmail.com

Cover by Cody Sexton

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