Memoirs are a tricky breed — irresistible but not entirely trustworthy seductresses of the publishing world that lure readers with the siren’s call of a short, juicy read and the sheen of literary respectability. Writers, for their part, are drawn by the freedom to reshape memory with a novelist’s eye for dramatic effect. It’s a pretty good deal from both perspectives, so what’s the harm?

None, really, unless you’re the fact-finding, literal sort troubled by authors who blur the lines between " what really happened " and " what might have happened, " or " what should have happened if I’m going to make this a book you can’t put down. " If so, Bronx Boy will drive you crazy. The last installment of Jerome Charyn’s trilogy, it continues in the freewheeling style set by its predecessors. Like the figures that populate its pages, Bronx Boy takes no prisoners, advancing relentlessly while playing fast and loose with fussy matters like the truth. A note to the reader ’fesses up to this more directly than the flap copy, which gushes, "  . . . the higher truths of a masterly writer’s art render moot the question of exactly where the real world ends and Charyn’s imagined world begins. "

Picking up the story of Charyn’s childhood from The Dark Lady from Belorusse (1997) and The Black Swan (2000), Bronx Boy follows 12-year-old Jerome " Baby " Charyn through the colorful world of 1950s street gangs, dope addicts, petty thieves, and big-time crime bosses. Baby’s gang, the Bronx Boys, plot in the candy store of Tully Holland, a heroin fiend whose wife, Sarah Dove, sells her body to the local merchants for her next fix.

The cast of characters only grows from there: Wil Scarlet, local crime boss; Meyer " The Little Man " Lansky, infamous Jewish mobster; Lulu Meyers, chauffeur and bodyguard. Then, of course, there’s Baby’s family: his father, Sam, a beaten-down furrier; his asthmatic brother, Harvey, relegated to Arizona; and his mother, Faigele, the " little bird, " the dark lady, the black swan whose larger-than-life presence pervades this trilogy. A Russian immigrant who wobbles between vague melancholy for her lost country and a fierce instinct for survival, Faigele has a reputation for dealing cards that once stretched from the Bronx to the Catskills. Her vision now dimmed by glaucoma, she and Baby devise a signaling system that enables her to call the hands at the bat mitzvah of a local princess.

A shelf full of fiction and nonfiction testify to Charyn’s affinity for detail, from Darlin’ Bill (a novel about Wild Bill Hickok) to The Isaac Quartet, a recently reissued collection of crime novels featuring Brooklyn police inspector Isaac Sidel. Bronx Boy is no exception, re-creating a world of soda jerks, zip guns, and roadhouses. " The musk of her body was murderous to boys of twelve and thirteen, " Charyn writes of Sarah Dove. " She moved like a muscular snake. "

Bronx Boy falters occasionally under the pressure of dialogue that sounds mannered and self-conscious. " You won’t find your destiny in a candy store, " Tully Holland tells Jerome. " But I’ll profit from you while you’re here. " Charyn’s love of a good story and his gift for telling one overshadow such missteps, however. Baby’s knack for weaving a tale wins him a spot in the parlor of the merchant nobility, where his gothic version of the story of Judith and Holofernes captivates Masha Roth and her sisters. In The Dark Lady from Belorusse (the simplest, most affecting installment of the trilogy) a dog-eared edition of Bambi is the talisman that brings Baby and his mother together: " We had to sight each word, sound it on our tongues, before it would give up any secret. Words would float along a line like ships caught in a white sea, and you had to lend yourself to them like a sea captain, or you’d never learn to read. " That sense of mystery, of a tangible place and time unfolding on the page, is the gift Charyn bestows upon his readers. In Bronx Boy, he returns to a lost world and makes it new all over again.