BLOOMINGTON NATIVE AND best-selling author Michael Koryta’s latest crime novel, Die Famous, riffs on one of the most notorious Indiana gangsters Hoosiers have never heard of—Al Brady of Indianapolis.
Brady and his fellow desperadoes—James Dalhover and Clarence Lee Shaffer—embarked on a Depression-era spree of robberies and murders that started in Indy in 1935 and ended two years later in an FBI shootout at a Bangor, Maine, sporting goods store. Brady dreamt of emulating Indiana’s dark legend John Dillinger.
Stephen King has called Die Famous “the best gangster novel [he’s] ever read.”
Koryta, 44, has more than 20 novels in his own name and a line of supernatural thrillers under the pseudonym of Scott Carson. He was a 20-year-old sophomore at Indiana University when his first crime novel, Tonight I Said Goodbye, earned an Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination.
Koryta was inspired to fictionalize the story of the Brady Gang for obvious reasons. He splits his time between Bloomington and Camden, Maine.
“I think it was my Hoosier roots and being a transplant to Maine,” he says. “It was fascinating how they were known in Maine, but not by many people in the rest of the country.”
The historical thriller unfolds through the more sympathetic voices of a fictional Indiana family whose lives become tragically intertwined with the gang. Those characters are Edward “Nickel” Terhune, the gang’s getaway driver; his girlfriend, Savannah Cody, and their 12-year-old son, Alford; and Savannah’s father, Wendell, a retired railroad detective who tries his best to protect his daughter.
Koryta has a gift for getting inside the heads of his characters, no matter their age or gender, then serving up richly detailed internal monologues that create engaging characters and page-turning plots.
“That’s the joy of fiction … trying to take a journey in a life that doesn’t match up with your own experience,” he says. “I’m always looking for details that would be unique to this [character].”
Indianapolis readers may be surprised to learn that many of the novel’s Hoosier locales are real. Tremont House, a 1930s gangster bar, is now the Slippery Noodle. The Willard Restaurant in Franklin, where the story begins, is still open. And, of course, so is the Hancock County Jail in Greenfield, where the gang members bust their way out.
A physician forced to treat Nickel’s leg wound early in the novel is fictional, but the Broad Ripple location was inspired by the same setting in a Humphrey Bogart film, The Desperate Hours.
“That whole sequence is a little bit of a wink to that movie,” Koryta says.
Reviews of Die Famous have been uniform in their praise. “Enthralling,” writes Publishers Weekly. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a fresh, sometimes offbeat take on the 1930s gangster novel.”
But the endorsement from Stephen King has meant the most to Koryta. According to him, King is “a generous person—a mentor to a lot of writers, not just me. He really pays attention to who’s kind of coming up behind him.”
You can pay attention, too, when Koryta promotes Die Famous September 26 at 2 p.m. at the Carmel-Clay Public Library.
