Shadows of Chicago: The True Story of Three Men and the Crimes That Shocked America

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Chicago firefighter and author … Matthew Drew

Mar 15

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Matthew Drew goes to work in a building in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. It is a firehouse and Drew is a firefighter, one of 4,800-some other dedicated people in Chicago who share this precarious profession.

“I love my job,” he says. “There is no job on Earth any better.”

He lives across the city, in the Beverly neighborhood on the South Side with his wife and three young children and he likes to play softball and other sports. He also likes to write.

He’s been a firefighter since 2002. He’s earned a master’s degree in writing from DePaul University and has taught English composition at local high schools and colleges. He has taught firefighting tactics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has served on the Chicago Fire Department Hazardous Incident Team.

He joined the ranks of published authors in 2013 with his first book, researched and written he says “over five years, whenever I could find the time.” It is the fine and detailed, stirring and deeply researched “Shadows of Chicago: The True Story of Three Men and the Crimes That Shocked America.”

The book began as a story of Chicago Fire Marshal James “Big Jim” Horan, an important and courageous Chicago figure whose life and times have never been given their deserved due. “I was fascinated by him,” says Drew. “Just couldn’t get enough of him and his story.”

Drew researched and he wrote and he still fought fires. In February 2010 he was fighting a fire at 46th Street and Ellis Avenue. He was breaking through a wooden wall with an ax when that ax hit concrete and he felt a sharp pain in his back. Initially he had no idea what damage there was but he soon learned that it was very bad. He had shattered a disk and severed his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the waist down. The outlook was bleak: “You’ll never walk again,” doctors said.

But he did, through a slow but steady recovery and now says, “I am virtually as good as new.”

On top of this physical trouble, a flood in his home wiped out all of his research materials and soured him on the book. Eventually he came back to it, reconstructing his research and deciding to expand the story to also include two other main characters.

So, in addition to Horan, we get to know his childhood friends Charles Comiskey, the baseball player/manager who founded the White Sox and helped start the American League, and Fred Busse, eventually the corrupt mayor of Chicago and a man of sordid tastes and wicked friends.

All three men come to tragic ends and their roads there are filled with many facets of Chicago’s lively history, from the nasty/sexy denizens of the Levee district and the craziness of its First Ward Ball, the Black Sox scandal and a variety of nefarious characters, including politicians and a fellow named Al Capone.

The book’s opening grabs the reader, starting when the three main characters are kids, fresh from playing sandlot baseball on a bumpy field Oct. 8, 1871. It was later on that day, the kids in bed, when shortly after 9 p.m. “a fire broke out in the O’Leary barn. … Minutes after, they woke to the sounds of screaming men, women, and children. To their horror, they discovered their neighbors wearing torn, filthy pajamas, their bodies covered in soot, quickly moving from the fire burning behind them … now engulfed by a red-orange fire spiraling a hundred feet into the sky. The clear, star-filled night was draped by a dense-black smoke cloud speckled with glowing embers. The fire below reflected off the dark smoke cloud, making the scene even more astonishing to their young eyes. They must have felt terrified as they stared at the terrible beauty of the rising inferno.”

“One thing that is gratifying is how many firefighters have bought my book and told me they liked it,” Drew says. “While I was writing, I mostly kept it a secret except from a few people.”

For all his academic credentials, Drew writes in clear and unadorned prose. He is a storyteller, not a philosopher or theorist. And he remains hooked on history, prowling libraries and independent bookstores. Few are surprised about his second career, by his diligence.

Drew intends to keep writing, focusing on fires and the men and women who fight them, here and elsewhere. He has been donating a portion of his first book’s proceeds to the fire department’s fund for widows and orphans.