STetc - nice long blog post on Pynchon's oeuvre including ST

[Michael Bailey]

And a cheese fact check link!

https://willlayman.substack.com/p/thomas-pynchons-shadow-ticket-magritte


Towards the end:

Now we have Shadow Ticket, yet another genre story of the gumshoe persuasion. And the critical reaction has been mild. The author's insistence on staying out of the public eye gets ritually trotted out, and then the book gets mostly (though kindly, as Pynchon is 88) dismissed.
I'm not writing a review of the book here. But it tells a story of Hicks McTaggert, a former union-busting tough who shifted to the private investigation business. It is the early 1930s in Milwaukee, shortly before the repeal of Prohibition and concurrent with the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Hicks is tasked with tracking down the heiress of the cheese empire run by Bruno Airmont, "the Al Capone of Cheese". She absconded with a Jewish swing clarinetist, Hop Wingdale, leaving behind a fiance ... and her money and reputation. Hicks knows her because, a brilliant hoofer in his spare time, they danced together before Hicks found himself rescuing her from pursuers, leaving her at an Indian reservation along Lake Michigan. Though Hicks doesn't want this work, a conspiracy that seems to extend from his employer to the British intelligence agency puts him aboard an ocean liner headed to Central Europe so he can chase the heiress and, ultimately, Bruno himself. (For the record: the mob really was engaged in manipulating the cheese market in the 1930s!<https://classicchicagomagazine.com/the-chicago-milk-wars-and-the-mob-cheese/>)