Crime Stories

A couple of the Windy City’s tough-talking cops put down their guns long enough to sign copies of their new thrillers at Joseph-Beth Booksellers’ Chicago Crime Writers’ Day event. Sergeant Michael Black’s fifth novel, A Final Judgment, pits private eye Ron Shade against the city’s most relentless prosecutors. Fellow sergeant Dave Case’s Out of Cabrini: A Macbeth Novel centers on a pair of violent street gangs that are at war with each other.

Case based his story on incidents he gathered from more than 20 years on the job -- particularly an early-’90s skirmish between gangs in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green neighborhood. “We were the best of the best, and we handled Cabrini-Green like no one else could,” he says. Case was born in Indiana but moved to Chicago to become a patrolman. By 1990, he relocated to Saint Paul, Minnesota. But he says he was “craving Chicago” and returned to the city’s force a decade ago. “I have a team of my very own fire-breathing, combat-tested, door-kicking warriors to leap in the path of trouble,” he says. Case turned to writing last year -- primarily as a way to document Chicago’s brutal and frequent crime sprees. Out of Cabrini, he says, pays tribute to the flatfoots who work the mean streets. “I have the honor to say that I’ve locked up an asshole in every district in the city,” he says.