Ed Carboni (photo provided by Ed Carboni)
Story ideas can come to writers in surprising ways.
Holmesburg native son Edward Carboni was watching television when he got the idea for a short Christmas novella about an angel who not only talks like a mobster, but has his own crew.
“During the Christmas season of 2005, I was at my brother Tom’s house going though the TV channels when I came across a program that was attempting to explain the hierarchy of angels,” he said in an e-mail to the Northeast Times. “One of the charts reminded me of an FBI chart for the mob.”
A few beers and jokes later, he said, he had the basic premise of Boss Ralphie, which chronicles the Archangel Raphael’s mission to save a little girl and provide a small-time crook an avenue for redemption.
As a holiday story, Carboni’s 41-page novella pays tribute to other Christmas classics while it makes allusions to mob movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas that are only as subtle as Joe Pesci armed with a baseball bat.
They will amuse you. So will the mob-style handles used by some of the more familiar members of the heavenly host who work for “the Don of all the universe.”
Archangels are called bosses. Michael is Mickey. Gabriel is Gabe. And main character Raphael is Ralphie. Seraphim and cherubim, the higher order of angels who have God’s ear, are called the chubbies, or even more derisively, “the suck-ups.”
“I wanted to make sure that it would have the funny references,” Carboni said during a phone interview. “I wanted the humor to be in there, but I wanted it to be as simple as possible.”
Ralphie is an angel who muffed some previous missions and had been demoted to “recruitment.” The book opens with him walking down a street in Holme Circle and entering a nursing home to confer with a retired SEPTA driver who is soon to become one of Ralphie’s crew.
When not in heaven, however, much of the action takes place in South Philly and concludes in Center City near a very famous intersection.
The book’s subtitle is A Holiday Tale of Redemption, and that is what it is even though one of the members of Ralphie’s celestial crew speaks very much like an irredeemable hood.
Finch is his name, and he is the one who can’t resist alluding to mob movies when he isn’t offering to give the crew’s redemption target, Bugsy Sullivan, a slap upside the head.
Carboni, 49, now lives in Key Largo, Fla. He grew up on Frankford Avenue in Holmesburg, the 11th of 13 children. He attended St. Dominic’s elementary school and Father Judge High School. He graduated from Holy Family University.
He left Philly for good in 2001, but comes home frequently for family visits. He now lives on a 32-foot ketch in Key Largo’s Pilot House Marina and writes every day when he isn’t bartending, sailing charters or repairing marine engines.
After he came up with the idea for Boss Ralphie, he said it took a few years “to actually find a story line to fit” it.
Carboni was finishing another novel, Cinderella Joe, when he related his holiday story notion to a friend who was a paramedic in Kansas City. His friend told him about efforts to save a little girl’s life, and Carboni liked that story so much he wrapped his plot outline around it.
“I put the little girl in the story and it dramatically changed,” he said.
In 2009, he self-published the book after friends asked for copies. This year, it was published by Outskirts Press, and sells for $7.95 in paperback.
Boss Ralphie is Philly all dressed up for the holidays. “I like to think I got the Christmastime feel right,” Carboni said. “I really miss that time of the year in the city.”
Bugsy, the thief, has to change to achieve his own redemption. The city is portrayed as a “place where change can happen, where people can overcome their own selves and move ahead,” Carboni said. “They did it a couple hundred years ago, so why not?”
The book’s finale is at Fifth and Chestnut streets, the address of Independence Hall, but when he was writing the story, Carboni didn’t mention the historical site.
“When I first realized the mistake, I was going to change it, but I thought that, if you’re going to free a guy from the tyranny of himself, why not keep it at a place where a nation did the same thing,” Carboni said. “It’s one of those things that I really enjoy about writing. It’s like the ocean. You never know what’s going to happen no matter how well you prepare.” ••
Reporter John Loftus can be reached at 215–354–3110 or [email protected]
