Maybe no one knows where more bodies, figurative and literal, are buried in this town than Rick Anderson. He’s pounded the streets and court files for four newshounding decades, at the P-I, Times, and now Seattle Weekly, where I worked with him in the ’90s. He’s chronicled an endless procession of ghastly and amusing crimes, alarming and endearing lowlife, and official sins and pecadillos. So it’s natural he should assemble a chronicle like this: Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City.

The result is a good read and a valuable volume for any aficionado of Seattle history, politics, or crime. But it’s also a bit ramshackle, like so many books by deadline-bit journalists champing to get on to the next hot story.

Seattle Vice is and isn’t a book about Frank Colacurcio, Seattle’s pinball baron-turned-fleshpot king, who died in July at 93, two months after the feds finally closed down the no-gropes-barred strip clubs that made him formerly rich, perennially notorious, and politically poisonous. Colacurcio’s name doesn’t appear on the front cover, but his picture does, and his story provides the narrative architecture and most of the text. But many passages, even chapters, concern subjects only tangentially connected, if at all—from Chinatown’s Wah Mee massacre to harmless oddballs like George and Pansy, “Seattle’s only mother-and-son funeral-attending team.”

That would be fine if instead of merely cataloging Seattle’s sordid side Anderson showed what distinguished it from, say, Portland’s. Or if the thuggish, one-dimensional Colacurcio provided a lens for understanding it. There is a fascinating dual biography yearning to break free here, of Colacurcio and the now-centenarian lawyer-turned-governor-turned-elder statesman Albert Rosellini. Rosellini defended young Frank when he was first busted—for statutory rape—at 16. Eight decades later he tarnished his own reputation funneling covert “Strippergate” contributions from Colacurcio to three city council members. That book might explore the conditions in the local Italian-American community that produced two such characters. For starters, how Prohibition, which Colacurcio grew up under, contributed to the delinquency of a generation by criminalizing something everyone did or accepted. (My grandfather made much more wine in his basement than the official head-of-household exemption allowed.)

Anderson is sketchy on Colacurcio’s roots—on why this son of a truck farmer, who started out selling veggies at Pike Place, “turned from produce to gambling” and became Seattle’s sultan of sleaze. But these aren’t topics he’s explored in his articles, and they don’t enter here. Much that Anderson did cover gets poured in: He finally gets to recount without euphemism how the residents and patrons of a certain Hoquiam cathouse literally shook it to the ground. Miscellany like that may make Seattle Vice a notebook dump. But what a notebook!

Seattle Vice: Strippers, Prostitution, and Crooked Cops in the Emerald City Sasquatch Books, 242 pp., $17.95 paper.