It’s not news to savvy real estate developers, young artists looking for affordable housing, commuters pushed out by Toronto’s bonkers housing market, or Angelo Mosca, but Hamilton might finally be ready for its close up.

Although regarded, at least by down-the-nose Torontonians, as a greaser with a knife in its cuff — a sentiment blithely echoed by Hamilton legend Tom Wilson, who has said that his city was punk rock before punk existed — Lake Ontario’s steeltown finds itself rounding into a vanguard of new expression. Despite — or perhaps, because of — its woolly downtown, rheumatic shoreline and pockmarked history, Hamilton is vastly interesting; Toronto with a fever and the sweats. While the works of Salvatore DiFalco, David Collier and others have mined these veins, it’s still a place largely unwritten about in Canadian letters. Another artist who has identified the city’s narrative protein is Trevor Cole, whose recent book, The Whisky King: The remarkable true story of Canada’s most infamous bootlegger and the undercover Mountie on his trail, dives into an era when Hamilton was a bootlegging hub, filled with rounders, ghouls and thugs.

Cole tells the story of ambitious mobster and bootlegger Rocco Perri — small, stocky, social and quietly fearsome — and the man who pursued him, a resolute and self-hating Italian immigrant named Frank Zaneth, regarded as the RCMP’s first undercover operative. Both men came to North America from opposite regions in Italy — Perri from the South; Zaneth from the North — and Cole’s portraiture details their upbringing, home life and struggles in the new world alongside the civic evolution of Canada, taking us through the rise of prostitution, crime, gambling and the dance of sin and alcohol, the latter propelling Perri into one of Canada’s most opportunistic, and combative, rum runners.

One of The Whisky Kings’s best moments comes when Cole takes us on a spin through Ontario’s prohibition years between 1916 and 1919, and how the Temperance movement created a gin-soaked underground, yielding the blind pigs upon which Perri built his fortune.

In Zaneth’s storyline, we find the Mountie going undercover as a union militant during the Winnipeg General strike, an episode that illuminates Canada’s difficult birth as a nation. Both men assumed several alternative identities as a way of concealing their shadow activities; that Cole has deftly charted their ghostly paths is a major achievement here.

Part of the trick of deeply historical writing is the ability to soar above the story while knowing when to stop and twist the lens so that a detailed view can rise from the surface; a kind of literary Google mapping. Cole’s book provides a vast and officious sweep of Canada at the turn of the century and beyond, and he’s a good lens twister, but it’s not as if you leave the book feeling covered in Hamilton’s factory soot or drowning in the blood of the city’s organized crime. For readers who want their history ably documented, this may be a sturdy point, but I prefer something a bit more fantastic and wild in the storytelling. Nonetheless, the tale — and the times — are compelling enough that you’re hitched once the story gains momentum with the rise of both Perri and the man entrusted to bring him down.

While Perri and Zaneth are the main trunks of the story, the book is branched with characters from a John Huston epic: piano-playing wharf rats; Mafia reprobates; fusty councillors; and a handful of cops who can’t shoot straight. It’s a compelling gallery, and the author does his best to tile them into the narrative, yet the book rests with its two principals, who, in the end, come to represent the yin and yang of Southern Ontario, and, perhaps, Canada: one who feels the desire to step across the tracks for whatever awaits him, and one who tugs the other back by their suspenders. And all around them: a sea of drink.