The Jones Men

Vern E. Smith

Description

An all-out drug war explodes in 1970s Detroit when a young Vietnam veteran decides to rip off heroin kingpin Willis McDaniel. In the chaos, rival outfits, the Mafia, and even junkies themselves try to step in to fill the void while one lone assassin tries to hunt them all down—and one determined cop tries to stop it all.

Vern E. Smith formerly served as the Atlanta Bureau chief and as a national correspondent for Newsweek. As a principal reporter with Newsweek's Special Projects Unit, he contributed to four cover stories later published as books. One of the stories, “Charlie Co.: What Vietnam Did to Us,” won the 1981 National Magazine Award for Single Issue Topic. He also served as a principal reporter and blogger for the 2004 Voices of Civil Rights oral history project, which is permanently housed in the Library of Congress. His work has also appeared in Emerge, the London Sunday Times, Ebony, GEO, the Crisis magazine, Merian magazine, and the History Channel Magazine.

Sujets

• Drug wars
• Urban fiction
• Donald Goines
• General officer
• General
• Heroin
• Crime
• Iceberg Slim
• Blaxploitation
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Rosarium Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781495617867
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Jones Men
Special 40th Anniversary Edition
by Vern E. Smith
Introduction by Woodie King
Copyright 1974, Vern E. Smith.
No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher
ISBN: 978-0-9891411-8-5
LCCN: 2014935053
Rosarium Publishing
P.O. Box 544
Greenbelt, MD 20768-0544
www.rosariumpublishing.com
Cover art by Keef Cross.
Cover design by Gerald Mohamed
Vern Smith s The Jones Men is one of the greatest urban crime novels ever written. Originally published in 1974, it was The Wire before there was The Wire . A cold, unrelentingly authentic journey into the dark, dog-eat-dog world of the Detroit heroin trade, The Jones Men is as brutal, honest, and eminently readable as noir gets. A genuine classic.
-Gar Anthony Haywood, author of Cemetery Road
Vern E. Smith s The Jones Men belongs to, and broke out of, an underground lineage of crime novels that cannot be overlooked. He weaves an intricate tale that enthralls and informs, while giving us portraits of men and women caught up in the life. The book captures your imagination and doesn t let go, long after the story is done.
-Gary Phillips, author of Warlord of Willow Ridge
What They Said in 1974
A fierce taut action tale it moves on crisply cinematic chase scenes and bloody murder rendered in karate-chop language that knifes through the gunsmoke and flashes over the blood puddles without a bit of false sympathy.
- Newsweek
A large accomplishment in the art of fiction written with terse, impersonal immediacy seen, heard, felt and reflected off the blue-steel barrel of a handgun.
- New York Times Book Review
A tough, hard, authentic look at the people who deal in living death.
- Houston Post
A brutal, searing novel of gang war by an author who is hailed as the equal of Hemingway.
- San Francisco Examiner
Vern E. Smith knows the scene his dialogue is real and right and frighteningly subhuman.
- The New Yorker
Not just the facts but also the smell, feel and terror that the facts alone could never convey convincing.
- Chicago Tribune
The best street novel I ever read until now was Little Caesar. The Jones Men exceeds it in importance. The Jones Men is a work of art.
-Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate
FOREW0RD
What distinguishes Vern E. Smith s The Jones Men from the crime novels of Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, Daschelle Hammett, or Mario Puzo is that The Jones Men is an African-American mystery novel by an African-American writer; and Vern Smith was one of only a handful of African-American writers producing such stories when The Jones Men first appeared in 1974. The Jones Men was one of the few books of its kind to be nominated for a prestigious Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. To add to its accolades, it was a 1974 New York Times Notable Book.
The Jones Men defies the traditional crime novel categorizations. The gangsters of The Jones Men are the new breed: they are not robbers of banks; they are after a much bigger stake-heroin. The black men in their twenties who inhabit The Jones Men -Lennie Jack, Joe Red, T.C. Thomas, Foxy Newton-emerged in the Detroit subculture not too long after the Detroit Riot of 1968; and very soon after, Detroit became the murder capital of the U.S.A. The heroin trade afforded these young men the luxury of new cars, fine clothes, and beautiful homes-not unlike the well-dressed gangsters of the 1930s and 40s who inspired the crime film genre.
Around that time, Vern Smith joined the Detroit Bureau of Newsweek Magazine . Smith s article in Newsweek , Detroit s Heroin Subculture, captured the imagination of socially conscious Americans. It informed us that the drug subculture and the men who controlled the heroin trade were known in the street as the jones men. Being a Detroiter, as well as a filmmaker, I read the novel immediately after its publication. I recognized many characters who I knew growing up in Detroit. James Moody, for instance, the inspiration for lean, mean T.C. Thomas, was my best friend until we reached the age of 15. When he was in hiding from some crime, he looked me up in New York back in 1970. I would not see him again. James became a professional killer who existed above and beyond redemption. In 1972 his body was found in the trunk of his car at Detroit Metro Airport.
Other characters in the novel took me back to those days of cross and double cross and quick violent death. The Jones Men captures these men as I remember them, dangerous and bold. The dialogue is authentic and precise to Detroit. You hafta make examples out of people, the droll hired gun T.C. Thomas says, before launching a rampage to find his boss s transgressors. As young boys growing into manhood, we emulated the motion picture gangsters. Our heroes were all gangsters-like James Cagney s Cody in White Heat ( Made it, Ma! Top of the world! ); Alan Ladd as Raven in Graham Greene s This Gun for Hire ; and in the first gangster classic, Edward G. Robinson as Rico in W.R. Burnett s Little Caesar ( Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?). When Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate, called The Jones Men the best street novel since Little Caesar , he was on to something.
Believing that the novel would make a fine film, I pursued the film rights to The Jones Men . A year later, Vern delivered a brilliant screenplay. Robert Shay and Sara Riser at New Line Cinema gave me a distribution agreement. The prospect of making the movie was bright. Hollywood was in the midst of a boomlet of action films featuring black characters- Shaft, Superfly, Come Back Charleston Blue, Cotton Comes to Harlem . But almost as quickly, the black film craze faded, and The Jones Men screenplay got lost in what is called turn around.
New readers will discover the book has lost none of its power to enthrall and entertain. Last year I produced a reading of Vern s screenplay at the Castillo Theater featuring 15 notable African-American film and television actors, including, in an ironic twist, Jamie Hector of the acclaimed HBO TV series The Wire , as the lead character of Lennie Jack. Their efforts were rewarded with a standing ovation, a fitting acknowledgement that The Jones Men , already a great book, would be an excellent motion picture.
Woodie King, Jr.
Producer
New York City, 2014

Part One
1
Saturday Evening
For Bennie Lee Sims wake, Lennie Jack chose the sky-blue Fleetwood with the chromed-up bumpers and the bar-line running from the trunk to the dash, dispensing six different liquors with chaser.
Joe Red brought the car to a halt in front of Fraser s Funeral Parlor on Madison Boulevard. He backed it in between a red El Dorado with a diamond-shaped rear window and a pink Lincoln with a leopard-skin roof.
Lennie Jack wore a medium-length Afro and had thick wide sideburns that grew neatly into the ends of a bushy moustache drooping over his top lip. He got out of the passenger seat in a manner that favored his left shoulder. He had on a cream-colored suede coat that stopped just below the knee, and a .38 in his waistband.
Joe Red was shorter and thinner and younger than Lennie Jack. He got his nickname for an extremely light complexion and a thick curly bush of reddish brown hair; it spilled from under the wide-brimmed black hat cocked low over his right ear. He had on the black leather midi with the red-stitched cape; he had a .45 automatic in his waistband.
They came briskly down the sidewalk and went up the six concrete steps to the entrance of Fraser s.
An attendant in a somber gray suit and dark tie greeted them at the door.
We re here for Bennie Sims, Joe Red said.
Come this way, the attendant said.
He guided them down a narrow hallway past a knot of elderly black women waiting to file into one of the viewing rooms flanking the hall on either side. The hallway reeked of death; the women wept.
They passed three more doors before the attendant led them left at the end of the hall and down a short flight of stairs. A single 60-watt bulb illuminated the lower level. The attendant went past the row of ebony- and silver-colored caskets stacked near the staircase and stopped at a door in the back of the room.
They re in there, he said. He turned and headed back up the stairs. Lennie Jack rapped softly at the door. They stood a few feet back from the doorway to be recognizable in the dim light.
The door cracked.
This Bennie Lee? Lennie Jack said.
Yeah, this it, said a voice behind the crack.
A man with wavy black hair in a white mink jacket and red knicker boots let them in. He relocked the door.
The room smelled of cigarette smoke. A row of silver metal chairs had been stacked in a neat line on one side, but most of the people come to pay their respects were scattered in the back in tight little clusters, talking and laughing.
At the front of the long room, near a small table of champagne bottles, Bennie Lee Sims tuxedo-dad body lay in a silver-colored coffin with a bright satin lining.
His face was dusty with a fine white powder.
Lennie Jack walked over to the coffin. He dipped his fingers in the silver tray of cocaine on top and sprinkled it over Bennie Lee.
Joe Red stepped up behind him and tried to find a spot that wasn t covered. He finally decided on the lips and scattered a handful of the fine white crystalline powder around Bennie Lee s mouth and chin.
They moved through the crowd, shaking hands and greeting people. Almost everybody had come to see Bennie Lee off.
The Ware brothers were there: Willie, the oldest at twenty-four; Simmy, who was twenty; and June, who often swaggered as if he were the elder of the clan but still had the baby-smooth face and look of wide- eyed adolescence. He was seventeen.
Pretty Boy Sam was standing in one corner with his right foot resting on one of the metal chairs. He had smooth brown skin and almost girlish features, topped off by a poin