Plot
The story takes place in a mysterious underworld of swanky nightclubs where armed criminals listen to Rat Pack music and hold shootouts from a seated position, behind desks.
Mickey Holiday is the top enforcer for Vic, the mob boss. Vic is about to be released from a psychiatric facility, or, as his adversary Jake Parker puts it, "the loony bin." In his absence, Ben London has been running Vic's nightclub while Mickey has been romancing both Rita and Grace Everly, which is doubly dangerous inasmuch as they are sisters and Grace was previously Vic's girl.
Parker recruits a number of hired guns in an attempt to seize power. Mickey kills the first to challenge him, Lee Turner. The next one brought in by Parker, identified as Nicholas Falco and supposedly the fastest draw of all, murders Mickey's close friend, Jules Flamingo, who is unarmed. A showdown is arranged and Mickey ends up eliminating both Parker and the apparently overrated Falco.
Vic returns to resume his reign as mob boss. He brings with him a new enforcer, the "real" Nicholas Falco, the previous one having been an impostor.
"Brass Balls" Ben London promptly challenges Vic for control of the organization (while singing "My Way" on stage in the nightclub) and is shot dead. Falco proceeds to gun down the remaining opposition, including "Wacky" Jackie Jackson, and is eager to shoot it out with Mickey Holiday once and for all.
Mickey attempts to repair his relationship with Rita, who is furious that he has been seeing her sister on the side. Mickey finally confesses to Grace that he has been seeing her in the daytime and Rita at night. She also has been unaware that Vic is back in town.
At a final confrontation held in a private office, Grace reveals that she is pregnant with Vic's child. Forced to choose between Holiday and Falco before they shoot it out, Vic sides with his old friend and Grace kills Falco. He and Mickey end up (apparently) living happily ever after with the Everly sisters.
Read more about this topic: Mad Dog Time
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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