Knowing my fondness for local history, it's no surprise that someone handed me a copy of Nycole Collins' slim new book, Columbia: Vice Wars on Front Street.

Unfortunately, the book makes bold claims of the western Lancaster County community's crime-ridden past but provides little of substance to back it up.

Columbia, nestled on the eastern shore of the Susquehanna River, has a rich history -- including being a major stopping point during the western migration era of colonial settlement and a vital link in the Underground Railroad. It was also the town that stopped the Confederate army's advance toward Philadelphia in 1863, when townsmen burned the bridge to Wrightsville and turned Lee's forces back toward Gettysburg.

Collins focuses instead on the criminal element, which she says ruled the borough with an iron fist nearly a century ago.

The author notes on the back cover "how dangerous the small borough was" and says "the probability of making it out alive was unlikely." In her Introduction, she says Columbia "was the epicenter of crime and rackets in the Keystone State during the 1920s and 1930s -- the domicile of vice lords, beer barons, slot machine kings, and white slavers." Further, she says, "Tommy guns barked spasmodically; bombs exploded periodically; the number of racketeers and the houses of prostitution reaped a record harvest."

There is also mention of gun battles as Columbia gangsters vied for control; details on those incidents, however, are sparse.

This was all very surprising to my father, who was born in Columbia in the 1930s and lived there for the next couple of decades. While he was too young to have much memory of the '30s, his parents certainly would have noticed all the tommy guns and explosions, to say nothing of the high mortality rate. I suppose Collins' claim that "making it out alive was unlikely" might mean most people then chose to live there until they died, but that seems a bit of a stretch.

It's perhaps appropriate, then, that Collins refers to the book in her Author's Note as a "novella," which, she says, "could easily have been a novel." She apparently is unaware that "novella" refers to a short work of fiction, however, because in the next paragraph she tells readers that "everything you're about to read is based on facts and actual events."

If so, Collins doesn't want her readers to know where her facts were found. Sources for her information are pretty much nonexistent in the book, so I turned to the back to find a bibliography; of course, there is none. So, did Collins find published sources for her story? Contemporary newspaper accounts? Did she dig through police records? Perhaps she talked to a Front Street madam on her deathbed. We'll never know.

Collins provides ample anecdotal evidence of the problem of prostitution back in the day -- a reputation for seediness that Columbia shared with its riverfront neighbor Marietta. But, while she mentions a few shootings and stabbings in her 76-page booklet, she hardly makes a case for the rampant violence and never-ending death she makes it out to be. I think she'd be hard pressed to find a town of that population that didn't have an occasional murder. And she lurches between anecdotes without providing much detail or even clear transitions.

Collins could also use a refresher on how to use commas in her prose. The high number of punctuation errors in the book is quite distracting.

I think a book on the history of Columbia's criminal past could be interesting, but this isn't that book.