Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz

 Ness's sense of humor didn't always play well in buttoned-down Cleveland, where people might approve of the Safety Director's on-the-job exploits but not his extracurricular activities.  One reporter called him "too handsome and self-centered to be popular with with the great bulk of hard-working conservative Clevelanders."

--Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher:  Hunting Down America's Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (William Morrow, 2020)

Do people remember Eliot Ness, played by Robert Stack in the TV series The Untouchables (1959-63) and by Kevin Costner in Brian De Palma's film of the same name in 1987?  Max Allan Collins wrote four novels about him in the 1980's, mostly covering his time in Cleveland, now the subject of a book co-written by Collins and historian A. Brad Schwartz.  After leaving Chicago when Prohibition ended Ness became Cleveland's Safety Director; the book is about his successes and failures in finding a serial killer while modernizing the police force in Cleveland.  He found the serial killer, he thought, but never produced enough evidence to arrest him, but he did succeed in adopting advanced techniques of ballistics and identification, fighting the police union to add African-American officers and requiring cops to be high school graduates. 

Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher is well documented, as it follows Ness from Cleveland to the office of Social Protection (protecting soldiers from venereal disease, mostly) in Washington during WWII.  After the war Ness returned to Cleveland, ran unsuccessfully for mayor and turned to alcohol and a number of dubious business positions, marrying three times and dying of a heart attack in 1957.  There is some obvious tension between novelist Collins wanting to tell a story and historian Schwartz not wanting to deviate from the known facts and details, but the result is fairly seamless in its accuracy about a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.