By the time Flesh and Blood appeared in 1977, Pete Hamill was an established journalist who had already published two novels. In Flesh and Blood he calls again on the urban jungle of Brooklyn, the violenceridden lives of its inhabitants, and the brawling panorama of the fight game, set within a context of family obsessions which move beyond the ordinary. Boxing and baseball are Hamill's major interests, and he has written about both subjects as a journalist and also as a novelist. Hamill describes boxing on his Digitalcity website as an exercise in savagery, calling it the antithesis of the grace, beauty, and redemption he finds in baseball, epitomized in his coverage of the McGwire-Sosa home run saga of 1998.

The naturalistic backdrop of the novel is Brooklyn's waterfront in the rain, when Bobby Fallon, a tough Irish kid, and his black buddy Kirk stumble into a bar...