I was talking about non-fiction writers I admire the other day and I somehow left Mark Bowden (Killing Pablo, Blackhawk Down) off my list. This is the review I did of his book Finders Keepers back in 2002.
In Mark Bowden’s FINDERS KEEPERS, a South Philly loser
becomes a folk hero when he finds $1.2 million that fell off an armored car. In
1981, the economy in Philadelphia was like a Bruce Springsteen song—jobs that
have sustained families for years have disappeared and they aren’t coming
back. That puts people like 28-year-old
JOEY COYLE on the streets without too many options. Joey never finished high school, but on the
docks, he was respected for his almost supernatural knowledge of
machinery. Unemployed, he just another
speed freak. And he’s getting into a
downward spiral—using all his money to buy meth and then borrowing from his
dealers.
This story really is kind of irresistible. Joey is a natural born loser, although he has
charm to burn. (There’s literally no one
with a bad word for him, even when he’s at his most “hopped up” from the drug
he calls ‘blow.”) There are moments in
this strange saga where we’re almost doubled over laughing—from his manic
search to find a suitable hiding place for the money to his attempts to shove
money into his clothes at the airport before resorting to donning panty hose.
