The story of Chicago May

Book Details

Library

Author

Nuala O'Faolain

Category

Biography

Publisher

Penguin Books

Printed By

Clays Ltd

Country

Great Britain

Personal

Year Published

2005

Date Read

10/09/2006

ISBN

0718145240

Personal Rating

8 / 10

Binding

Softcover

Pages

306

Overview

The legend says that May was a tall girl with red-gold hair and big blue eyes, compellingly attractive to men. At 19 she stole her family's savings and ran away from her home in Ireland to America – first to Nebraska, then to Chicago at the time of the 1893 World's Fair, and then on to the rip-roaring Tenderloin district of New York. In these new American cities she worked as a confidence trickster, a thief, a showgirl, and, when times were bad, as a prostitute, notorious as much for her violence as for her diamond rings.

But the woman the tabloids called 'The Queen of the Underworld' met her nemesis in a handsome, dangerous Irish-American burglar named Eddie Guerin. She was with him in Paris in 1901 when his gang robbed the American Express office, and when the others were caught, she got away – with the money. But May went back to Paris to help him and was arrested and tried with him. She was sentenced to five years in jail in France. He was sent to Devil's Island for life.

Against all odds, Guerin managed to escape, and made his way back to London. But the passion they once shared turned quickly to hate. Shots were fired, May was tried for attempted murder and sent to jail for ten years, where she was sustained only by reading and news of the rebellion in Ireland against British rule.

In 1917, May, now middle-aged, ailing and penniless, was deported back to a New York she hardly recognised. She threw herself into a relationship with a cruel and destructive man, and for him returned to prostitution, and when he ran away, she chased him, a gun in her bag, until, derelict, she collapsed on the frozen streets of Detroit. It was there, hospitalised, that she met the legendary police reformer August Vollmer, who urged her to write her autobiography as a path to redemption. May's memoirs bear witness to an outlaw experience of a kind rarely recorded by a woman. And even that was not the end of her story. The last experience of her life was love.

Comment

I like the idea behind this book: that of expanding on an ordinary life already recorded. The author does a good job, painting some wonderfully vivid images (and, more often than not, some terribly vivid images). Although May had a hard life, she doesn't inspire sympathy. Rather, I finished this book in awe of the strength this woman had – the strength to keep going and the strength of her hope. This is the story of a woman who should be acknowledged, if not lauded, by both her country of origin and her country of adulthood.