Baffling Last Chapter to Mystery Writer’s Life

For a crime writer who dispensed death to his characters with clinical street realism, Guy Izzi died against type.

His body was found on a cold Chicago morning, dangling from the window ledge of his 14th-floor office overlooking the expanse of Grant Park. A taut noose around his neck was lashed to a steel desk inside, and the wood-slab office door was locked--immediate signs of suicide to Chicago police homicide detectives who peered out at Izzi’s body from a travel agency window down the corridor.

But the dead man wore a bullet-resistant vest and his face and body bore bruises--contrary, baffling hints of foul play more common to the sort of refined drawing salon mysteries that hard-boiled detective novelist Raymond Chandler once dismissed as “utterly unreal.”

“People don’t kill themselves that way,” said Barbara D’Amato, a Chicago crime author and one among many Izzi friends who suspect murder.

Twelve days have passed without a ruling by police investigators on the death of Eugene “Guy” Izzi. But the official verdict--expected to be suicide--is unlikely to silence the speculation that pulsed through Chicago’s burgeoning community of mystery writers, then leaped beyond to the city’s book-buying public and, over computers, to the nation. Suicide or murder, Izzi’s death has dwarfed his own oeuvre, a posthumous dose of the celebrity that had long eluded a writer who--say some who knew him--thirsted for fame more than anything else.

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“He seemed to live, eat and breathe to be a popular, respected novelist,” said Stuart Applebaum, an executive at Bantam Books, the publishing firm that sold Izzi’s first novels about life and death in Chicago’s poor and crime-ridden neighborhoods, then took them out of print when they failed to sell.

Even with all his books out of print in the United States, there were plenty of reasons to live. His marriage, friends say, was flourishing after early rough passages. His two teenage sons were approaching college age. And his writing career, at low ebb in recent years, was on the verge of reawakening. A 432-page novel on racial tension and vengeance in Chicago is due out next spring--the first in a three-book contract.

Izzi “was in fabulous spirits,” said Avon Books editor Lou Aronica, when the two men discussed the book’s galleys the week before the writer’s death. “It was the book he always wanted to write.”

Police officials say they have no time frame for ruling on Izzi’s death. But department sources say detectives have leaned toward suicide almost from the moment they were summoned to Izzi’s rented office in a yellow-brick building in the Chicago Loop shortly before noon on Dec. 7.

Izzi, 43, died of asphyxiation, sources said, a death that did not come with the neck-breaking violence consistent with being pushed out of an office window. And coroner’s examiners have concluded that the bruises on his face and hands came from natural scuffs that occurred after death.

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Detectives have held off making an official finding while they check out reports that Izzi had received threats from militant extremist groups he claimed to have infiltrated while researching a book.

When police hauled in Izzi’s body, they found a pair of brass knuckles and a can of repellent spray. There were reports that he left transcripts of telephone threats. And one friend, a former Chicago police detective, forwarded information to investigators that the author had taped a death threat from an Indiana-based militia group.

“The militia lead is why they’re still up in the air,” said an official familiar with the investigation. “We have to take a lead seriously when it comes from a former detective.”

New York lawyer Andrew Vachss, a successful crime writer who refers to Izzi as “my brother,” said the dead man’s family needs “to have some reason why there could be a suicide. No one has come forward with any evidence why this man would have killed himself.”

The aura of danger surrounding Izzi’s final days seemed in character with a man who many say both relished the authenticity of the street and needed to escape it. A muscular, 200-pound ex-steelworker who hinted at early brushes with the law and a hellish childhood in the tough South Side district of Hegewisch, Izzi was loath to dwell on those days in conversation. Yet he returned to it again and again in his crime fiction.

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“He always would give off little hints about secrets that he knew, but that was all he would say,” said Judy Duhl, owner of Scotland Yard, a suburban mystery bookstore where Izzi showed up repeatedly for book signings. “But when you asked personal questions he would tense up. You could tell by his body language that was all he was willing to say.”

Izzi’s fictional characters crumbled and lashed out like real life losers. A tough in “Bad Guys” stubbed out a cigarette on a woman’s face. A violent husband battered his wife in “Tribal Secrets.” Wealthy Lincoln Park strivers were thrown together with small-time hoodlums. The books sold well in spurts, garnered a few mystery book prize nominations, then gathered dust.

Izzi kept on, drawing as much from Chicago streets as from his own demons. He disappeared for weeks to do research, friends say, emerging with grim new tales. In 1991, when he posed as a homeless man to prepare for a novel, a street “predator” attacked him, ordering him to “Give it up.” “I had nothing to give,” Izzi wrote in a Chicago Tribune account.

The pose drew from Izzi’s own troubles. He wrote of being homeless 10 years earlier--after a drinking jag led to a brief separation from his family. Finding temporary shelter in a barbershop, Izzi described staring “longingly at the stropped razor blades on the back shelf, nestled there with the electric equipment and the combs, the brushes. Their sharpness appealed to me; the light glinting off them was my salvation. It would be fast, painless.”

But the man who wrote that entranced paean to suicide also knew enough not to succumb to those longings, Vachss and other friends insist.

“We all know combustible people,” Applebaum said. “Does that mean they’re either suicide-prone or likely to be knocked off? I don’t know. Was Guy combustible? Sure. Was he emotional and intense? Sure. So are 90% of the people who write fiction for a living. But they don’t die the way Guy did. That’s what makes it such a sad mystery.”