Murder on Skid Row by Charlene Wexler; Naples, Florida: Speaking Volumes LLC; © 2024; ISBN 9798890-222220; 101 pages, $14.95.
SAN DIEGO — This murder mystery takes place on Chicago’s run-down southside, circa 1966. But two murders don’t start the novel, they occur very close to the end. The story begins with a young, idealistic Jewish dentist starting a practice on Skid Row and becoming acclimated to the drunkards and junkies who inhabit the neighborhood.
His patients also include the prostitutes, pimps and small business owners who’ve remained in the neighborhood even after it went to seed. The lazy beat cop looks the other way at petty crime, which is habitual on the streets where most of the populace seek ways to finance their next high.
Dr. Mel Greenberg, DDS, hires a receptionist and part-time dental assistant who is competent, quick to learn, and is terrorized by her boyfriend, whom Mel has also hired to “protect” his dental practice.
Greenberg’s shabby office contrasts with his parents’ middle-class home, where he lives, and the wealthy abode occupied by the family of Cindy, his fiancée. His parents and Cindy want Greenberg to move north to a safer neighborhood and to establish a more conventional practice. Greenberg, however, is fascinated by the humanity that even the most derelict of his patients manifest. Besides, he has one year’s free rent provided by his landlord, the pharmacist on the first floor. In exchange, Greenberg recommends that his patients fill their prescriptions with the pharmacist downstairs, Abe Meyerstein.
Although Abe is a generation older than Mel, they develop a friendship of a sort. Abe lives with his wife, a politician’s daughter, in a much fancier neighborhood, but although the old immigrant neighborhood on the southside where he grew up has deteriorated badly, he is enamored with it and bound to it by inertia.
The murders disrupt Mel’s routine and throw Skid Row into a panic, but for me, at least, they were not the most exciting part of the book. I was fascinated by author Wexler’s portrait of Skid Row’s unfortunate populace.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.