Bohemia Village Voice

Al Capone Short Stories

Al Capone and other pieces is a slim volume of stories about the same size as the old Penguin 60s by first-time local author Andrew Jackson. There are in fact 32 of these ‘pieces’, the longest no more than a couple of pages, the shortest a few lines.
Frankly, they don’t all hit the heights – perhaps the author could have left a few of the more flippant doggerel pieces in his ‘experiments’ folder – but there are also several gems, which is pretty good going for any literary debut.
Mr Jackson has a deadpan wit that reminded this reader of Kurt Vonnegut, and a fondness for absurd treatments of unbearable subjects that is the hallmark of serious literature. In ‘Schmidt’, which lasts 300 words at most, a concentration-camp Nazi falls asleep ‘after a particularly horrible and exhausting day’, and wakes up 60 years later in a different body on a different continent. The consequences of this displacement are somehow fully awakened in just a few lines. It reads like the synopsis of a novel, and yet as an ultra-short story it chills the blood.
‘Poirot’ examines the burden of being a fictional creation. Like many of these tales, it is perfectly paced, and based on a brilliant conceit that could have come from Borges, conveying a similar sense that reality is not what we think it is but instead what we imagine it could be. Perhaps for this reason, the one character who links many of the stories is God – of the Big Daddy kind.
God it is who, like some cosmic genie of the lamp, invites Eric, in the story of that name, to become anything he wishes. The results are hilarious. There are plenty of stories in this collection which achieve the primary aim of any good short-story writer – that of stopping the reader in his tracks – and there are also others that don’t belong in this company. Finally, I must mention ‘Kilroy’. I’ve read it several times and it has me in stitches each time. Funniest of all, though, there is even an index.
o Al Capone by Bohemian resident Andrew Jackson, published 2010 by John Humphries, price £1.95. ISBN 978-1-874628-03-3. Copies from: 79, Bohemia Road.