The Lion's Daughter Book

Legs is the first of William Kennedy's Albany books and the story of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond told by his friend and lawyer Gorman. It is full of violence and humor as well as sex and loads of alcohol, a somewhat atypical gangster book actually. Enjoyable to read.

The story is told in a series of vignette chapters each with the name "Jack" in the title. Each one fills in consecutive order details of the life of Legs and his relationships with his wife, his lover, his lawyer and his gang. The language is colloquial with lots of slang which gives the book a realistic feel.

I think my favorite character was the beautiful and eternal Kiki, a sort of pastiche of Marilyn Monroe:
I see her there yet. I see her also crossing and uncrossing her silkiness, hinting at secret reaches, dark areas of mystery difficult to reach, full of jewels of improbable value, full of promise of tawdriness, of illicitness, of furtiveness, of wickedness, with possibly blue rouge on the nipples, and arcane exotica revealed when she slips down the elastic waistband of those sheerest of sheer. They infected my imagination, those dark, those sheer, those elasticized arenas of that gorgeous girl's life. (p. 68)
She is emotionally and financially dependent on Legs. Her relationship with his wife is unusual - sometimes fiercely competitive, sometimes woefully submissive and accepting.

Marcus Gorman gets more than he bargained for when he forsakes his political career for becoming a mob lawyer. It was dark now and I was wet to the underwear, standing in the middle of desolation, maybe about to be buried in a landslide, giving traffic directions to a bleeding, one-eyed psychopath who was, with one hand, trying to drive a mythic vehicle backwards up an enchanted mountain.
I'd come a long way from the K. of C. library. (p. 78)
This passage is typical of Kennedy's sense of absurdity and humor throughout the Albany novels.

There is a hilarious trip to Europe full of drinking and sex and crime where Jack doesn't quite learn all that he could: He could discover in quiet what his body already understood: that his fame hadn't answered the basic question he had asked himself all his life, was still asking. (p. 123) And so Legs just keeps running at full-speed through women and drugs getting shot multiple times before the final time...

There is a small truth about the mystique surrounding Legs that makes him a pop culture hero despite his violence and unworthiness as Marcus - writing decades later - compares to that of Nixon: who left significant history in his wake, but no legend; whos corruption, overwhelmingly venal and invariable hypocritical, lacked the admirably white core fantast that can give evil a mythical dimension. Only boobs and shitheads rooted for Nixon in his troubled time, but heroes and poets followed Jack's tribulations with curiosity, ambivalent benevolence, and a sense of mystery at the meaning of their own response. (p. 216)

After being absolved of a murder charge in court, The Pathé News cameraman then filmed it all. Inspecting the floor for a closeup, he discovered that the dust that fell was not dust at all, but pigeon shit. (p. 280)

An enjoyable read and a crazy trip, Legs is a great introduction to Kennedy's Albany universe.