Forty-three years after his death the old comrades of the now legendary Jack "Legs" Diamond are reminiscing atop their bar-stools in a somewhat boozier than Conradian vein. Among them, her memory juiced-up by the drink, one Flossie recalls that Diamond "had a tan collie, could count to fifty-two and do subtraction", that he "could turn on the electric light sometimes just by snapping his fingers", that "he could tie both his shoes at once". But the story that's enclosed within this romanticizing frame [Legs] and told us by William Kennedy's ersatz-Marlowe—a lawyer called Marcus who's paid to bail out the boys and front the mob with a clean bib and tucker—amounts to something less fantastic but considerably more gripping. Not that the narrative is consistently exciting: it does come with longueurs and detumescences, and as is the wont of stories told in flashes back it lights...