Candycane Casket
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Newsboys
15 min read
The article centers on paperboys and their daily struggles in 1921, including having to buy their own papers and protect them from weather. The Wikipedia article provides historical context on child labor in newspaper distribution, the newsboy strike of 1899, and how this occupation shaped American urban childhood.
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Prohibition in the United States
13 min read
The story is set in 1921 during Prohibition, with bootleggers like Carmello, temperance activists with picket signs, bathtub brewers, and cops on the take from rum runners. Understanding the full scope of Prohibition—its enforcement failures, organized crime rise, and social impact—enriches the story's historical setting.
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Police corruption
13 min read
A major theme is the tension between corrupt cops and the public who increasingly prefer dealing with criminals like Carmello over law enforcement. The article explicitly discusses cops being 'flagrantly on-the-take' and the moral calculus of underpaid officers enforcing unpopular laws, making this systemic issue central to understanding the narrative.
Everybody knows Donte Carmello’s a criminal. But the crime’s not interesting. The reason he makes papers is he’s mysterious. Gray fedora with a black or white velvet band. Big scar up his cheek and over the brow. Driven day and night on these long slow laps around the city. Sitting in the back with a skinny brown cigar, misted by smoke, and his car’s got this dull bloated glide to it on account of there’s armor plating in the doors. Two thousand pounds. And so folks’ll pause on sidewalks or kick back on a tenement’s porch or set their chins on a third-story windowsill to catch sight of that jungle-green Cadillac purring past.
Fedora’d silhouette inside. Paintjob fresh and grabbing sun like a candycane casket.
People see it and think, Must be some kinda guy.
But then the car’s gone and they see a buncha kids craning their necks as it goes.
“Hey!” Some geezer shouting from a barbershop stoop, “Don’t look up to a guy like that.” Sweeping a sidewalk as he says it. Kids walk away like, Yeah. Sure thing.
Cuz the other thing they like about Carmello apart from the mystery and the glamor is he’s generous. Like there’s a story that he’s getting driven around through the rain one day and sees a buncha paperboys huddling under a storefront, curled over the bundles of newspaper, and he sees they need shelter. Can’t say no to it. See, those’re Krohly Diary papers they’re selling. The only penny-daily in the city. Printers advise reading it with your face averted so’s your breath won’t soak it. These newsboys, in a downpour like this one, even just the moisture in the air is enough to set the pages’ edges dissolving into wormy gray flecks.
Which means they have to protect those papers long enough to get them sold. Not because it’s their “job” to sell papers, or they’ll get in “trouble” with anybody; only consequence is they’ll lose the investment.
The thing nobody mentions about paperboys is they gotta buy those papers.
Go look at the Krohly Diary offices every morning at daybreak. The couple dozen kids lined up in the cold, hands in their coat pockets, paddy caps pulled snug on their heads. Chewing licorice with small steaming bites. Passing around a
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