Time for Frankie Coolin

Time for Frankie Coolin tells the story of an absentee landlord in Chicago who, in the late 1970s, buys abandoned buildings and makes them just barely habitable so that he can charge minimal rent to his mostly black tenants. He then moved his family to the suburbs. He misses the city, but is managing pretty well until he does a favor for his wife’s cousin, allowing the man to store some crates in an empty building. Then someone sets the building on fire. Pretty soon, a pair of G-men start coming around, threatening Frankie with prison if he doesn’t talk to them. Since talking is not one of Frankie’s strengths, he just copes as he always has: by trying to tough it out on his own. Part psychological thriller and part period piece, the novel vividly evokes the south and west sides of Chicago and the people who worked there in the 1970s.

Bill Granger (1941-2012) was a Chicago journalist who wrote for the United Press International's Chicago bureau, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun Times, among others, and published more than twenty novels under the pseudonyms Joe Gash and Bill Griffith.