Utility infielder Mickey Rawlings is in a fix. A man trying to organize baseball players into a union has been shot dead, and everyone is saying Mickey did it. In self defense, sure, so the police don’t care: indeed, the police seem to be quite happy with the idea that a labor organizer pulled a gun on a war veteran like Rawlings and got himself shot. Nevermind that when Mickey heard the shot and found the body, there was no revolver near it, and when the police took the photo, there was — miraculously! — a revolver in the dead Wobbly’s hand. The big baseball men want to champion Mickey as their hero and pledge that America’s ballplayers won’t stand for this commie nonsense, and the International Workers of the World threatening to ‘strike’ — to strike Mickey, repeatedly, maybe beat him to death for shooting a union man. Fortunately, Mickey has made murder mysteries something of a side gig over the years (kind of like Ty Cobb performing onstage during the off-season), so now he needs to dig in and find the killer just to save his skin — and keep the rest of his club from turning him into a dead ball.

I have thoroughly enjoyed Soos’ baseball murder mysteries since discovering them years ago, and Hunting is no exception, combining as it does labor disputes with the ordinary murder mysteries. The drama is especially tense here because Mickey is threatened from all sides. The Wobblies want to do Mickey serious damage, and he’s granted a reprieve only because the Upton Sinclair-like friend of his who told him about the meeting vouches for him, but that vouchsafe has a time expiration. At the same time, dubious ‘labor coordinators’ hired by the league want Mickey to go full-throttle anti-union, and to stop looking into the odd circumstances of the organizer’s death — or, yanno, things will happen. Alone and friendless after his author-buddy is imprisoned investigating the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, Mickey has to bring all of his investigative experience and cussedness to the plate with him, and dig in. There’s a lot in the air in this book: Mickey is not overtly sympathetic to the Wobblies, but nor is he hostile, and he realizes that some teams are so badly treated by their owners that scandals like the World Series being thrown by the White Sox are connected to said behavior. All he wants, really, is to get two groups of men to stop threatening him, especially since an old girlfriend has blown into town and she’s interested in restoring their old pickup game. Being murdered is no good for the love life. Soos pitches a good story and the tension stays taut right down to the wire, wrapping up only in the last few pages. I’m think there’s one more book in this series I’ve not read, and I’ll definitely be pursuing it. Soos’ series is unique in itself — historical fiction + baseball + mystery — but the exploration of 1920s labor politics and the arrival of an organization headed by some J. Edgar fellow makes for a great story, and there are connections in topics to Soos’ previous books, especially Hanging Curve which explored the Negro Leagues.

Highlights:

“Would you want to be accused of killing somebody if you didn’t do it?”
He pondered a moment. “Well, I don’t expect that would bother me as much as if I did kill somebody, and the papers printed it.”

I’d finished dressing when there was an urgent hammering on the door. It was my landlady, who’d just discovered the glass on the sidewalk and the broken window. I let her in and tried to calm her down. She wasn’t satisfied until I agreed to pay for a new window and not let anyone shoot at me again. I wished I knew how to comply with that second demand.

I did become a major-league player, but I never got to meet Rube Waddell. In 1914 he died from pneumonia after helping flood victims in Texas. That ended something for me, but it took years more until I realized what it was: when a boyhood hero dies, it means boyhood is irretrievably lost. I sighed. I no longer had the innocent faith in baseball that I’d had at age thirteen, and I was angry as hell that I couldn’t get it back.

“I’m not entirely sure what she‘s—what we’ve—talked about. It always seems we have a lot to say to each other, but I’m never quite sure afterward what it was that we said.” There’s something about the lovesick that reminds me of the mentally impaired.

“Let’s just say that I think the laws should apply to everyone the same. I don’t like a cover-up for whatever reason.”
“You’re a fair-minded man.”
“No, I’m a lazy cop. It’s a helluva lot easier to enforce the laws evenly instead of deciding who should be exempt from them.”

I thought that was the reason for going to war: defeat the bad guys and then everything would be peaceful and happy again. Sure as hell didn’t turn out that way. All that happened was some boundary lines got changed and a whole lot of kids got killed in the process. What was the point?”