Flappers, Flasks and Foul Play

Author/Guide: Ellen Mansoor Collier

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1950s:Before Las Vegas, Galveston, Texas was called the “Sin City of the Southwest.” Based on true facts

ISBN: 978-0989417006
Genre: Cosy crime

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What you need to know before your trail

Real-life rival gangs fight over booze and bars during Prohibition

Jasmine Cross, a 21-year-old society reporter, feels caught between two clashing cultures: the seedy speakeasy underworld and the snooty social circles she covers in the Galveston Gazette. After a big-shot banker with a hidden past collapses at the Oasis—a speakeasy secretly owned by her black-sheep half-brother, Sammy Cook—Jazz suspects foul play. Was it an accident or a mob hit? Soon handsome young Prohibition Agent James Burton raids the Oasis, threatening to shut it down if Sammy doesn’t cooperate. Suspicious, he pursues Jazz, hoping for information and more, but despite her mixed feelings she refuses to rat on Sammy. As turf wars escalate between the Downtown and Beach gangs, Sammy is accused of murder. To find the killer, Jazz must risk her life and career, exposing the dark side of Galveston’s glittering society.

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Travel Guide

Galveston Music

Music is the background to this novel and Galveston in general and there are more than a few places to hear it for yourself in the style of the 1920s in many ways.

Galveston’s Gangs

Ellen Mansoor Collier:

“Like many port cities, Galveston greatly profited from Prohibition – bar owners, business men and bootleggers alike – until it was nationally repealed in 1933.

Colouful crime boss Johnny Jack Nounces and hard-boiled thug George Musey ran the Downtown Gang, the area north of Broadway

During Prohibition the Beach gang and Downtown Gang 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, sough of Broadway and on the Seawall.

The Beach Gang’s territory at the time was around the area around 61st Street and the Turf Club on 23rd street. The Turf club became the HQ of The Beach Gang – it was renamed the Surf Club in the novel”

The real story is that of the Maceo Brothers took over much of Galveston in the roaring 20s. The Galveston Gazette is fictitious but is based on the newspaper headlines of the day The Galveston Daily News which still exists today.