Shanty Irish (Autobiography) (Crime)

by Jim Tully, Paul J. Bauer (Introduction)

Publisher: Black Squirrel Books (June 2, 2009).

Softcover, 320 pages

“A wife, six children, two cows, a hog, a blind mare and a sense of sad humor, where my Father’s only possessions.  We lived in a log house, in and out the windows which the crows of trouble flew.

My Father was a gorilla-built man. His arms were long and crooked. The ends of his carrot-shaped mustache touched his shoulder blades. It gave his mouth an appearance of ferocity not in the heart. Squat, agile, and muscular, he weighed nearly one hundred and ninety pounds. His shoulders were early stooped, as from carrying the inherited burdens of a thousand dead Irish peasants.”

Jim Tully, along with Dashiell Hammet, was the creator of the hard-boiled style of American writing. This style was later picked up and refined by Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Menchen, and Raymond Chandler. But Tully stands out from all these others in the fact that they simply wrote in the style, while he lived it.

Author Jim Tully

Originally published in 1927, Shanty Irish, like the other novel of his I reviewed, Beggars of Life, this is an autobiographical tale of his life before writing. While the other book dwelled on his life on the road, Shanty Irish, is about the author’s growing up dirt poor in a log cabin in the late 19th century Ohio.

The term Shanty Irish is a derogatory term for poor and uneducated members of the race. As opposed to the Lace Curtain Irish who rose in power, education, and prosperity in America. The equivalent today would be the pejorative “white trash”. Of course, even being educated didn’t stop the old world of America from looking down on the Irish, as the old joke goes-

Q: “What’s the difference between Shanty and Lace Curtain Irish?”

A: “Lace Curtain Irish move the dishes out of the way before they piss in the sink.”

Like many of the old time autobiographies, the author gives a statement of facts as he saw them, but rarely offers any personal emotional insight or comment of his own. This is him relating stories from the past as he saw it, not a pity party for himself. It's what differs this book from Angela's Ashes, Tully offers no pathos for his own childhood.


The author with Charlie Chaplin. If you don't know which is which, punch yourself in the face.

Central to the action is the clan patriarch, his grandfather, Old Hughie Tully. A large boisterous alcoholic who spent most of his later days telling tall tales in saloons in exchange for drinks. Tully's own father was a cold-eyed distant ditch digger. Horse thieves and fraudsters polluted both sides of the family. Poverty was their bumper crop. They were so poor that after his mother died, Tully was placed in an orphanage for six years. All of it potentially heartbreaking, but Tully is a man about it. You would never have known it affected him at all.

Now as to how accurate the book is. That's difficult to tell. Nothing obvious sticks out as false, but Tully was six during the first half of the book, then went to the orphanage and didn't emerge until he was twelve. Thus he had to rely heavily on other's memories. So, a touch of exaggeration, a smidge of the big fish story, was bound to slip in, but that does not mean this isn’t a worthwhile look into a long dead America.

For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.