Jimmy Lyons of Charlestown’s tough Irish-American neighbourhood swore he’d never get involved in gangster life. He wouldn’t be like his father, who was murdered on a run-down industrial road near a polluted shipping channel called the Oilies when Jimmy was only a kid.But when Chinatown restaurant owner Zhang Wei offers him two grand just to put him in touch with the local gangster who stole some old movies of questionable origin and even more questionable content, he takes the deal.For Lyons, a wannabe filmmaker, the money means film school tuition. And he figures getting in good with Zhang will help him win the attention of Eu-meh, the old man’s art student granddaughter.But very quickly Lyons is deep into a deadly cat-and-mouse game as a one-time Chinatown Tong boss, a Charlestown gangster and a notorious South Boston mobster vie for the movies that he now suspects to be big-star porn, the stuff of blackmail. And if that’s not bad enough, he’s being stalked by the man who killed his father.Bryant explained that the idea for the novel came from some testimony before a House subcommittee back in the 1970s, which he came across while working in Washington as a reporter.Bryant, who worked in a film exchange in Boston one summer as a teenager, drew on his own background in that city for the setting for the book. He grew up in the Charlestown neighbourhood which he said has long been a working class neighbourhood and for the last century or more, majority Irish-American.“In fact, when I was growing up there in the ‘50s there was still a number of people around who would speak with an Irish accent because they came over from here,” he added.Bryant’s grandparents on his mother’s side arrived in Charlestown from Galway somewhere between 1900 and 1910. His father’s side had been in the US “since before the Civil War”.Bryant sent the manuscript for The Shadow King out to “a number of regular publishing houses and got the usual ‘thank you but this does not meet our interest at this time’ responses.So he ultimately decided to self-publish.Another book is in the works – set in Washington DC and centred around the murder of a congressman – while he also has to “polish off” a play he wrote.The Athy resident spent more than 35 years writing non-fiction. As a journalist he covered cops, courts, government and business for newspapers and magazines in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.For nearly two decades he wrote about the military, first as a reporter for the Military Times newspapers, then as an associate editor/reporter for Military.com, where his beat included the Pentagon, Capitol Hill and the White House.Bryant explained that his wife Linda had lived in Ireland previously, in Dublin, and moved back to the US for a while where they got married.They have family in Dublin and bought an apartment in Athy around 2013 when they were both still working; when they retired in 2016 they moved across the Atlantic.Why Athy? “We were looking around and even though we both drive, we decided that we would look – we would follow the train routes, because that made sense if in the event you wanted to travel by train or get to Dublin by train,” Bryant said. “So, we followed the route and checked out Daft.ie for what was available and we found this nice apartment here.”Having gone through the rigmarole of writing and publishing a book, does he have any advice to share?“Do it earlier than I did, don’t wait as long as I did!” he said. “You just have to keep plugging away at it until you find you’re confident enough to do it yourself or lucky enough to get somebody to actually look at your material.”

Everyone thinks they know Charlestown, the small, historically Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Boston sometimes referred to as the bank robbery capital of the country.

The “Green Square Mile,” as it’s been known, has given novelists and filmmakers alike plenty of fodder for crime stories. Authors Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Gone Baby, Gone), Chuck Hogan (Prince of Thieves), and Tom MacDonald (The Charlestown Connection, The Murder of Vincent Dunn), have each drawn inspiration from the tough, working-class town and its infamous Code of Silence. Dennis Leary and Ben Affleck have both put Charlestown’s rep for turning out bank robbers at the core of films, Leary with Monument Ave., and Affleck with The Town, based on Hogan’s novel.

But with The Shadow King, a Charlestown crime novel at last has a Townie-born and bred author, Bryant Jordan.

“The idea for the story came from some old congressional testimony I came across while in Washington,” Jordan said. “Like my protagonist, Jimmy Lyons, I was always interested in movies. The testimony I found dealt with a very different kind of entertainment-industry scandal, one that planted the seed for The Shadow King.

In the novel, Jimmy Lyons agrees to help Chinatown restaurant owner Zhang Wei get in touch with a Townie gangster, Mickey Ryan. Zhang wants to buy back some old movies Ryan stole from him, and offers Lyons $2,000 just to connect him to Ryan. He takes the deal, albeit reluctantly. His own gang-connected father had been killed years earlier, and Lyons is in no hurry to follow in those footsteps. But he soon finds himself in the middle of a possible gang war as Zhang, Ryan and South Boston mobster Whitey Bulger vie for the films that have a whiff of blackmail about them. And if that’s not enough to worry about, he’s being stalked by the man who killed his father.

Though fiction, Jordan sets the story against the backdrop of Charlestown in 1974, as neighborhood drugs are getting harder, overdoses are claiming lives, and armed robberies, including of banks, are taking a heavy toll. Adding to the tension is the looming plan to desegregate Boston schools through forced busing. Charlestown, a nearly all-White community that wants to keep it that way, is on edge over the thought of sending its children to predominantly Black schools while Black students sit in Charlestown classrooms.

“I spent nearly 40 years writing non-fiction. I covered courts, cops, town government, business. Everything except sports. The second half of my career I spent covering the military,” Jordan said. “There’s no way I could write a novel set in Charlestown, or anywhere, really, and leave out the harsh realities, the dark side. Every place has a dark side. It’s just important to remember that everyplace has a good side, as well.”

Bryant Jordan was born and raised in Charlestown. He graduated from Charlestown High School in 1969 and several months later joined the Army. He served in Vietnam with the 1st Cavalry Division from 1970 to 1971. A 1979 graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he earned a BA in Journalism/English Studies. He worked for several newspapers in Massachusetts, including The (Quincy) Patriot-Ledger, The Cape Cod Times and The (Attleboro) Sun Chronicle. He also was the Business Editor for The Keene Sentinel and a correspondent for The Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire. He later worked for Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times, just outside Washington, DC, and Military.com, a DC-based online news operation, where his beats included Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the White House.

Jordan retired and moved to Ireland with his Charlestown-born and raised wife, Linda, in 2016.