Former journalist writes of Illinois crime in first novel

NEW BERLIN, Ill. -- From the Lucky Strikes he puffs to his relentless stalking of the front-page story, Jake Brosky is the epitome of the hard-nosed newspaper reporter of the 1950s.

Brosky is as brash as his creator, author Taylor Pensoneau, is soft-spoken. But both are keen observers of the world around them. And Brosky is the central character in Pensoneau's first work of fiction, "The Summer of '50," published this fall by Downstate Publications. In the book, a murder mystery, Brosky looks into gangs, gambling and corruption in Southern Illinois.

Many of the characters who inhabit Brosky's world are Southern Illinoisans, and the hero's crime reporting for the St. Louis World takes him from East St. Louis down into Carbondale, Cairo and the fictitious towns of "Grandville" and "Smithburg."

As he delves into the murder of a crusading newspaperman, Brosky first assumes the killing resulted from the journalist's crusade against gambling. But a second slaying -- this time of a top mobster and ladies' man -- just doesn't add up. Brosky's nosing around unearths a long-buried secret that can cause a bigger upset than the gambling raids.

Anyone who has read Pensoneau's "Brothers Notorious," a nonfiction account of the Shelton Gang, might assume the novel was inspired by his research into the real gang. But Pensoneau says he wrote the novel's manuscript before he did any work on the Shelton book.

His friend James Bagley, a Chicago attorney who wanted to produce movies with Midwestern themes, had asked Pensoneau to do a script. The "20-page, single-spaced story treatment" Pensoneau turned out eventually evolved into the novel. Bagley, who now lives in Beverly Hills, Calif., holds the movie rights to the new book.

"I believe it will be a movie and will film in Southern Illinois," said Pensoneau, of New Berlin.

Pensoneau, who will retire soon after 26 years as president of the Illinois Coal Association, is still an avid reporter at heart.

After graduating from the University of Missouri in 1962, Pensoneau joined the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, spending four years in St. Louis as a general assignment reporter and 12 years in Springfield, where he headed the Post-Dispatch's Illinois Statehouse bureau. He joined the coal association in 1978.

At Missouri, his teacher and editor, Tom Duffy, talked Pensoneau out of his original goal of sports writing and "straightened me out," the author recalled with a laugh.

"I was from Belleville, and Duffy had been a reporter and editor in East St. Louis -- part of that time while the Sheltons were in power," Pensoneau said. "He gave me lots of firsthand stories."

Pensoneau worked with Duffy every night on the Columbia Missourian.

"He didn't want me to be an embarrassment to him, so he was really tough on me," Pensoneau said of his mentor.

Pensoneau said the character of Brosky is a composite of four old investigative reporters he knew at the Post-Dispatch. He listened to their accounts of how they ferreted out stories. He also heard their tales of the gambling clubs that dotted Southern Illinois until Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson brought in state police to raid them. It was that crackdown on gambling that inspired the book.

"I am nostalgic, and I got to put it into action in this book," Pensoneau said. He immersed himself in the 1950s, so he knew "the cigarette brands they smoked, the popular drinks ... which pop songs were on the radio."

Though the story is fiction, the settings and details are accurate -- from the Cache River swamps to the Casa Loma Ballroom in St. Louis.