Summary
A beat cop’s parable detonates inside a snow-globe Manhattan: neon gutters, dance-hall gaslight, the sour perfume of nickel beer. O’Malley, badge glinting like a moral lighthouse, collars a jittery juvenile teetering on the lip of felony and, instead of handcuffs, unwraps a cautionary fable—Boomerang Bill, the kid who mistook the underworld for a ladder. Bill, all knuckles and day-dreams, courts Kitty, a twirling confection of spangles and bruised hope, crossing Tony the Wop, a capo whose grudges metastasize into public spectacle. Cue ricocheting vengeance: frame-ups, a rigged robbery, a knife-edged finale in a fog-choked alley where every bullet curves back like the namesake toy, proving fate’s perverse boomerang logic. The yarn corkscrews through dives, precinct basements, rooftop chases, and a Chinatown opium crib, each locale painted in chiaroscuro so severe it feels carved rather than shot. Love, pride, and the mirage of upward mobility fuse into a Molotov that explodes in Bill’s hands, leaving the listener—wide-eyed recruit and winter-night audience—recoiling from the same precipice.
Synopsis
When New York City police officer O'Malley learns of a young man who is about to embark on a life of crime by taking part in a robbery, he takes the boy aside and tells him the story of Boomerang Bill, another wanna-be gangster who wanted to be a big shot in the New York crime scene. It seems that Bill fell for a pretty young dance-hall girl, and went up against local gang boss Tony the Wop when he insulted her. Tony, who never forgot a slight, found a way to make things very, very tough for Boomerang Bill, in a way that he never saw coming.
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