‘The Good Thief’ is good storytelling

The Good Thief By Leo Furey Flanker Press $21.00 282 pages

Sonny Mcclusky is about to turn 18, on the cusp of graduating from Trades School with his mechanics certification, and ready to step into full-time work at the family business, Charlie’s Auto.

He lives in Pouch Cove, just outside St. John’s. It’s 1967, the summer of love, a season of military escalation in Vietnam.

The band he manages, Johnny Fabrella and the Acid Test, is having a real moment, largely thanks to its lead singer and Sonny’s Americanborn cousin. “Everyone wants a music career. Johnny’s got the best shot at making it.”

And he’s on the verge of his first serious romantic relationship, with the beguiling Arlene. “Everything is looking up. We like the same things. I love that she’s into motorcycles and mechanics. Age nine, she wired an alarm from her front door to her bedroom so she’d know when her parents came home.”

But Sonny’s beset by problems and tensions, too. Starting with his father, Charlie.

We know from the opening lines of the novel “The Good Thief” that Charlie is

planning to die, and needs Sonny’s assistance to do so in the manner he fervently wishes, a way that will allow him to join Lucy, his wife and Sonny’s mother, who died years before. “Need your help, son. Not asking you to shoot me, like some old horse with a broken leg. Just supervise the thing, is all.”

Johnny, who Sonny considers a brother, is eligible for the draft and insists on enlisting for service in Vietnam.

Charming, lazy, “handsome Johnny” purportedly works in the garage, at least Charlie pays him cash from time to time, and has dropped out of school and into the drug scene.

Arlene’s father, Mr. White, owns the local gas station and has long campaigned to merge his business with Charlie’s.

Thus Sonny feels a tug of doubt in Arlene’s professions of feelings for him — is she just after the garage?

Looming over all this, and foreshadowed by the title, is Charlie’s doctrine of fairness and justice. He sees the rich getting richer and the poor staying poor and he knows his moral and spiritual heroes, Jesus and Robin Hood, would take action.

The Mccluskys have a vocation, the garage.

But in that garage they have a secret calling, fueled by a printing press that produces counterfeit money, usually $20s but sometimes $100s as well.

Charlie has taught Sonny the meticulous process of producing passing bills, and the cautious, careful method of exchanging bad for good, and then using that good for anonymous gifts or generous, don’t-worry-about-paying-itback loans.

Charlie can scrupulously back this action to the hilt.

Almost everything he says is implicitly or tacitly about morality. “I’m a big fan of Jesus. The Mccluskys have always been on the side of the downtrodden. We’ve been politicians, union leaders, clerics, and outlaws; we’ve never worked for the rich. Never! It’s the Mcclusky way.”

He tallies his spiritual grounding in a ledger, and Sonny, too, often sets out his troubles in columns of pros and cons.

Charlie also derives his ethics from the works of Louis L’amour, an author Sonny also becomes fond of, if only because it’s a link to Charlie; Sonny also frequently turns to “Robinson Crusoe” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for guidance.

Another major figure claiming a fix on right and wrong is Mr. Crenshaw, nicknamed “Comrade,” “a big, middle-aged man in his fifties … Broad, defiant face, large nose that looks like it was broken at one time.”

He teaches mechanics at Trades School.

At least that’s what’s on the curriculum — what he mostly does is espouse Marxism, undermine the sanctity of official currency, and decry U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policies.

His wife, Flo, is another standout, a bodybuilder who wants to perform with Acid Test. “Originally from New York, there’s a rumour she killed her first husband during a wrestling match.”

Additionally, two local groups cast their own murky shadows.

One is Eden Farm, a commune of hippies that seems drenched in dope and hashish (and the drug laws in the late 1960s were quite rigid and unforgiving).

The other is the Doctor Club, which Charlie belongs to (as does Crenshaw), presented as a forum for philosophical debate, but there are rumours otherwise.

Leo Furey’s second novel immerses the reader in an intense and complicated and authentic world, and from the first words the stakes for Sonny are high.

It’s packed with cultural details, palpable environments, and fully realized characters.

The narrative is part crime caper or spree, part coming of age, and all good storytelling.