VAMPS, VILLAINS and VAUDEVILLE
By: Ellen Mansoor Collier
Before Las Vegas, Galveston, Texas reigned as the “Sin City of the Southwest”—a magnet for vamps, villains and vice. Inspired by real people and places, the Jazz Age Mystery series is set during Prohibition in 1927 Galveston, where businessmen rubbed elbows with bootleggers and real-life rival gangs ruled the Island with greed and graft. VAMPS, VILLAINS AND VAUDEVILLE incorporates a fictitious vaudeville troupe with actual Galveston gangsters to create a make-believe series of events and murders.
Starting in the 1880s, vaudeville remained popular for decades, originating as a burlesque show and evolving into more of a variety show with animal acts and a wide range of performers, much like the travelling carnivals of that time. With the advent of the movies, and especially the talkies in 1927, vaudeville quickly fell out of favor and by 1932, had all but disappeared. VAMPS, VILLAINS AND VAUDEVILLE attempts to capture the fading glory days of travelling vaudeville shows and describes a fictitious director’s desperate efforts to keep the shows alive.
During Prohibition, Galveston’s Beach and Downtown gangs fought constant turf wars for control over booze, gambling, slot machines, clubs and prostitution. To keep the peace, the gangs tried to compromise by dividing the Island into two halves: Bootleggers Ollie Quinn and Dutch Voight headed the Beach Gang, south of Broadway and on the Seawall, along with the notorious Maceo brothers, Big Sam and Papa Rose.
Colorful crime boss Johnny Jack Nounes ran the Downtown Gang, the area north of Broadway, and partnered with a dangerous Syrian thug, George Musey. According to Gary Cartwright’s book GALVESTON, second-hand man George Musey only had one arm, and VAMPS fabricates a possible scenario in which Musey loses his right arm. (Gangsters tended to be camera-shy so actual photos of Musey aren’t available, to my knowledge.)
The infamous but long-gone Hollywood Dinner Club on 61st Street was located in the Beach Gang’s territory, near West Beach. Mario’s Italian restaurant is an invented Downtown Gang headquarters off Broadway, not connected to the current pizza parlor in Galveston. However, Martini Theatre and most places mentioned in the novel are actual locales still in existence.
The Maceo brothers, Rosario and Sam (Papa Rose and Big Sam), were Sicilian immigrants who eventually took control of the Island, known as the “Free State of Galveston” for its vice and laissez-faire attitude, for roughly 25-30 years, from late 1927 on, until the Maceos’ deaths. Sam Maceo died in 1951 of cancer and Rose Maceo passed on due to heart disease in 1954.
VAMPS, VILLAINS AND VAUDEVILLE is loosely based on actual and fabricated events leading to the Maceos’ gradual take-over of both gangs in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The Galveston Gazette is a fictitious newspaper but the headlines in the novel are based on actual stories that appeared in national newspapers and The Galveston Daily News, the first and oldest newspaper in Texas, founded in 1842 and still in publication. Since many of the gangland crimes and activities went largely unreported and/or under-reported, the main characters and circumstances in the novel are invented and not intended to malign or distort actual persons, places or cases, but are purely the author’s imagined version of possible events.
For more information on “Jazz Age” slang, please visit these sites:
http://home.earthlink.net/~dlarkins/slang-pg.htm
http://local.aaca.org/bntc/slang/slang.htm
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