Rose City Vice


Book Description

The City of Roses, as natives of Portland, Oregon like to call it, has a long and honorable history of crime and corruption, starting as far back as the post-Civil War frontier days, leading into the mobster-infused decades of the twentieth century when prohibition, prostitution, gambling, and hard drugs besieged the town. The so-called Great Portland Vice Scandal of 1956-57 spilled into national politics, with hearings before the Senate Rackets Committee. When the '70s rolled around, members of the police narcotics squad were caught red-handed perpetrating nefarious deeds. This Northwest city, known best today for its punk rock and hipster comedies like Portlandia, was once overrun with corruption and foul play. Rose City Vice reveals a city where the cops are putting drugs back on the street, maybe even committing murder. The city council is high on coke, and the mayor is carrying on a clandestine sexual relationship with 13-year- old schoolgirl while under surveillance by the vice squad. It's 1970's Portland and blackmail is in the air.




Portland Confidential


Book Description

From a Portland Tribune columnist comes Portland Confidential, the story of Big Jim Elkins, a conman and criminal who arrived in Portland in 1937 and helped unleash prostitution, bootlegging, gambling, and drug running.




Dark Rose


Book Description

Dark Rose reveals the fascinating and sordid details of an important period in the history of what by the end of the century had become a great American city.




The Rose City


Book Description

A Lambda Literary Award Finalist Winner of The Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction Award-winning short stories from the author of The Danish Girl and Pasadena “Passion for us all will remain a troublesome thing.” The Rose City combines a collection of unforgettable characters with Ebershoff’s trademark emotional insight and intelligent prose in seven stories about young men and boys as they discover and rediscover themselves in a world that never really works out as planned. Often tragic but lacking in despair, The Rose City delves into the tribulations of youth, identity, sexuality – and longing for something just out of reach. Written with compassion and truth, these stories present characters who live at the margins of the world at the moment they take their first steps toward acceptance and love.




Storied & Scandalous Portland, Oregon


Book Description

When vice and scandal are all fun and games. Portland, Oregon began as a town of itinerant young men who had no shortage of diversions at the end of the workday. This city grew up with lots of revelry and little regulation. After the last tree fell in logging season and after the workday ended on the docks, those young men broke out the cards. Saloon culture quickly took hold in Portland, offering alcohol, sex, gambling, and other diversions. This book traces the storied and scandalous history of Portland, from the underground and elite saloons and gambling rings to the vice, scandal, and fun they brought. Readers will meet the impresarios, gangsters, and racketeers who colored Portland’s history.




Wicked Portland


Book Description

Tucked away in the northwestern frontier, Portland offered all the best vices: opium dreams, gambling, cheap prostitutes, and drunken brawling. In its early days, Portland was a "combination rough-and-ready logging camp and gritty, hard-punching deep-water port town," and as a young city (established in the late 1840s) it developed an international reputation for lawlessness and violence. In the early 1900s, the British and French governments filed formal complaints about Portland to the US state department, and Congressional testimony from the time cites Portland as the worst place in the world for crimping. Today, tours of the alleged Shanghai Tunnels offer Portland visitors a taste of that seedy past.




Kings of Vice


Book Description

Rapper and "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" star Ice-T brings his unique knowledge of the streets to a gritty new crime thriller.




Portland Noir


Book Description

In a city full of police controversies, hippie artist punk houses, and overzealous liberals, Portland, Oregon, is a place where even its fiction blurs with its bizarre realities. Brand-new stories by: Gigi Little, Justin Hocking, Christopher Bolton, Jess Walter, Monica Drake, Jamie S. Rich (illustrated by Joelle Jones), Dan DeWeese, Zoe Trope, Luciana Lopez, Karen Karbo, Bill Cameron, Ariel Gore, Floyd Skloot, Megan Kruse, Kimberly Warner-Cohen, and Jonathan Selwood. Editor Kevin Sampsell is a bookstore employee and writer. He is the author of a short story collection, Creamy Bullets (Chiasmus Press), and the upcoming memoir The Suitcase (HarperPerennial, summer 2009). He is also the editor of The Insomniac Reader (Manic D Press) and the publisher of the micropress Future Tense Books.




Parallel Lives


Book Description

In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.




Gold Coast Madam


Book Description

Chicago, 1988. I was 52 years old, 5'4" tall, and 130 pounds, with red hair and a 36DDD bust, enjoying dramatic Lake Michigan and skyline views from my 21st-floor apartment in the landmark Lake Point Towers building. I had never felt more alive. I was Chicago's reigning madam, providing $400 an hour call girls to Chicago's business owners, traders, lawyers, judges, politicians, mobsters, pro athletes, and Hollywood stars at addresses all over Chicago's downtown and Gold Coast. Vice was on their way up--the doorman had tipped me off. I started thinking back on my life, where I came from, and how I ever got to where I was now. I began life the youngest of nine on a primitive farm in the backwoods of Tennessee. Seeking to make my own way in the world I would meet and marry a man from Cicero, Illinois. Soon I was pregnant eight times in eight years, malnourished, and beaten--once nearly to death. That’s when I left. When I recovered and returned for my five kids, I discovered they'd been put in a brutal orphanage. It took me years to get them back. God knows why I got into this business. It was to save my kids. But I chose to stay. I enjoyed it, I was good at it, and I’d still do it today if I could... From my earliest days as a hanky-panky entrepreneur in the 1960s--renting rooms by the hour at the Addison Motel--others took notice. Playboy, Penthouse, the Sybaris. My adventures took me to all over the Western Suburbs, to Atlanta, Savannah, and the Oak Brook Polo Fields, and eventually to the nightclubs, bars, yachts, and penthouses of Chicago’s Gold Coast. I’d work in this business until 2002 when the FBI busted me and I served 17 months in federal prison. Now I’m retired, living in Florida, and spending my days like many seniors here, walking, playing with my grandchildren, going to church. Let me take you back to my days of juggling three sugar daddies, living and breathing sex, providing the city’s elite with beautiful women, having loads of cash and tons of fun, and experiencing the joys and heartaches of a life on the edge, lived to its fullest.