Con Lehane’s gripping new novel shows how fear politics never disappears. It just adapts.
In 2021, then-New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani stood at City Hall Park and announced he would fast until city officials provided debt relief for taxi drivers crushed by predatory medallion loans; debt that had driven some drivers to suicide. On Day 5, he and other elected officials staged an act of civil disobedience blocking traffic in Lower Manhattan. The NYPD arrested them, zip-tied them, and loaded them into police vans.
This scene of a Democratic Socialist being jailed for defending drivers finds its chilling reflection in Con Lehane’s The Red Scare Murders (Soho Crime, 400 pages), set in 1950s New York during the forgotten 1949 taxi strike. The strawman shifts: Antifa or Socialist has replaced the Communist menace, “woke” replaces “Red.” But the dynamic remains unchanged. Advocate too loudly for working people, and the machinery of fear kicks in.
Con Lehane knows this world intimately: former union organizer, labor journalist, veteran bartender of two-dozen drinking establishments (better than an MFA, though okay, he has one from Columbia). He delivers historical noir that refuses to soften its edges: atmospheric, legally sophisticated, and unnervingly relevant to a moment when ideological labels still determine who deserves justice.
More importantly, he isn’t afraid of complications. He embraces them.
The novel centers on Harold Williams. While Smith Act trials (prosecuting Communist Party leaders for advocating overthrow of the government) proceed in a Lower Manhattan federal courtroom, a Black Communist cab driver and active organizer was sentenced to death in a nearby criminal courthouse for a murder almost no one is entirely convinced he committed. Or entirely convinced he didn’t. That includes his own comrades.
Two weeks until execution. No new evidence. An impossible case.
When This Lawyer Calls, You Answer
Labor leader Duke Rogowski has hired defense attorney Gil Silver to save Harold, but Duke waited until the last minute, until Harold is about to be “strapped into the chair,” because he’s caught in the same political machinery. As Gil explains it: “Harold’s death sentence is collateral damage in the worldwide struggle for supremacy between capitalism and communism. Duke’s trying his best not to be part of the collateral damage himself.”
Gil is a power broker, a kind of lawyer I’m not sure exists today. His office walls display photos with FDR and labor leader John L. Lewis (though he’s taken down the one with Communist Party leader William Z. Foster; Gil is nobody’s fool). He can arrange hospitalizations, pull courthouse favors, and has a stable of locksmiths and private eyes ready to deploy.
He represents mobsters like Big Al Lucania. Their fees fund his lifestyle and his freedom (presumably) to take cases others won’t. People take Gil’s calls because he’s “judicious as to when he stuck his nose into something. He didn’t ask favors. If he called you, you owed him or you’d get something out of it.”
Silver hires Mick Mulligan, a blacklisted Hollywood cartoonist turned Hell’s Kitchen PI, to investigate. Mulligan is the novel’s protagonist and a compelling one, but for anyone interested in legal strategy and courtroom dynamics, the real star is Gil Silver.
Two Weeks, No Evidence, One Communist
The case against Harold is tissue-thin: a gun (the “star exhibit”), possession of the victim’s belongings in his cab (easily planted), and testimony from a Communist Party turncoat who made “death-defying leaps of logic” connecting Marxist ideology to murdering your boss.
Harold’s court-appointed attorney bungled the trial defense, calling character witnesses, which opened the door for the prosecutor’s snitch to testify about Harold attending Communist Party club meetings.
Most damning: the prosecutor’s closing argument. He reminded the jury that Communists were murderers. Harold was a Communist. Therefore, Harold was a murderer. As ugly as that argument is, Silver tells Mulligan: “I’m sorry to say I doubt an appeals court would find anything wrong with that argument.”
Gil’s assessment is brutal: “Scare tactics convinced a jury if they failed to convict they’d be aiding and abetting Stalin’s crusade to destroy the American way of life… You can be sure being a Negro and a Communist is enough evidence to sentence a man to death.”
Since an appeal is a long shot, Silver tells Mick what he really needs: “You need to find the killer.”
Silver has a moral compass. When labor leader Duke Rogowski negotiates a master contract in exchange for expelling the Reds from the cab drivers union, Gil refuses to attend. “Some deals even I can’t stomach,” he tells Mick.
My read was that Silver works every angle before having to actually go to trial. Still, he wants to build a case with evidence that will hold up in court. When Mick gets information, he memorializes it, writing it down. I can’t remember a hardboiled detective novel where the investigator documents every encounter with such rigor. Mick explains, “Gil went nuts if I didn’t have contemporaneous notes on any case I worked on.”
The National Guard Will Drive Your Taxi
The 1949 New York taxi strike wasn’t just about wages; it was ideological warfare playing out on city streets.
The Taft-Hartley Act had just outlawed sympathy strikes and secondary boycotts, specifically designed to kneecap militant labor organizing. Lehane depicts FBI officials telling union boards that the Communist Party was using cab drivers to infiltrate the taxi industry as part of a plan to control transportation and provide Fifth Column support for the North Koreans.
The governor threatened to call in the National Guard to drive the cabs. Yes, the National Guard. Strikers got hauled to jail en masse, with Gil’s office phones “blinking from stacked-up calls from a passel of bondsmen and lawyers staked out at police precincts around the city bailing the striking cab drivers out.”
Against this backdrop, what chance did Harold Williams have?
The Mystery That Actually Works
This isn’t just a history lesson with a whodunit tacked on; it’s a proper mystery where the solution emerges organically from the tangled web of labor politics, mob business, and personal betrayals.
The murdered cab company owner Irwin Johnson had swindled small fleet owners out of taxi medallions through a counterfeit scheme: the same medallions that would become instruments of predatory lending 70 years later. The suspect list is deliciously baroque: Mob enforcers, the victim’s wife (spotted in a cab with one of the Irish muscle guys the night of the murder), jilted lovers, and even the Communist Party itself, operating under the theory that they framed Harold because they suspected he was an FBI informant.
The mystery is genuinely twisty, and Lehane plays fair with the clues. But the novel’s moral core lies in Gil’s refusal to accept the system’s corruption. He insists on his legal philosophy: “If a defendant can’t be shown beyond a reasonable doubt to have violated a law, he’s innocent.”
When Mick pushes him on whether Harold actually killed Johnson, Gil waves the question away: “There may be lots of reasons why the trial wasn’t fair. That doesn’t mean Harold didn’t kill the guy. Maybe he had a good reason.”
This refusal to provide easy moral certainty is what elevates the book. The Communist Party members aren’t romanticized; they’re true believers with their own blind spots. The mobsters aren’t cartoon villains; they’re businessmen with somewhat brutal methods.
Pattern Recognition
Lehane doesn’t need to spell out the parallels; the history does that work. The Party members in his novel mostly wanted a fair shake for cab drivers. That demand was framed as sedition then. Today, demands for housing affordability and debt relief get labeled “woke” or “socialist.” The language shifts. The scare tactics don’t.
For readers who love legal thrillers rooted in real history and noir that engages with the messy complications of justice, The Red Scare Murders is essential reading. Just don’t expect easy answers. In 1950, and perhaps today, there aren’t any.
The Fine Print: Thanks to Soho Crime for the advanced copy.