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CHASING THE DEVIL'S TAIL: A Mystery of Storyville, New Orleans
by David Fulmer
Poisoned Pen Press, November 2001
269 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 1890208841


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Wonderful. Truly, this is an outstanding debut novel. Meticulously researched, fast-paced, extremely well-written, it is difficult to find sufficient plaudits for this fascinating novel.

This is a story of a time in America when we had lost our way, when world wars that helped to raise America to it's bold world-power status were still in the distant future, a time when racial and gender relations were still sunk in the residue of the Civil and Spanish American Wars This is a story of a time when incredible home grown talent was developing a new and original musical form, a form that was ultimately to spread worldwide. This is a story about that fabled, sometimes smelly, exotic city of the delta. This is a story about New Orleans.

More, this is a tale of that iniquitous section of New Orleans around the beginning of the twentieth century, the fabled section of the city known as Storyville. There are few places in the world which still carry the burden of the reputation like that of Storyville. In the first decade of the century, knifings, murders, drunkeness and dope addictions were common. It was all fueled by too much money, a river of money that flowed through the city. It's estimated that around 2000 women worked as prostitutes in Storyville at that time. It was a city segregated in so many ways, owing largely to its mixed heritage, that almost no one could accurately explain the rules.

In that decade, Storyville was home to an odd French dwarf who had made it his life's work to preserve in still photographs many of the inhabitants, principally the prostitutes. His penetrating scalding yet sympathetic work is still celebrated around the world. His name was Ernest Bellocq. It was the place where Louis Armstrong got his training, the Preservation Hall Jazz band made history and it was the birthplace of jazz and gut-bucket blues. Jelly Roll Morton got his start there, as a teenager, playing piano in some of the better bordellos and so did a cornetist who is still talked about in hushed tones. His name was Buddy, "King" Bolden. His talent was so great, he created a whole new musical movement. His talent was so great, it drove him mad. In his twenty-ninth year, he was committed to a Louisiana hospital for the insane and never played another note.

That's the context, the setting, for this taut story of a Creole detective who works for the boss of Storyville, a white man named Tom Anderson. Things are pretty normal in Storyville on a hot night in 1910. The detective, one Valentin St. Cyr, is working security in Anderson's club when a white man enters and with no hesitation, no concealment, guns down a nasty Creole pimp named Littlejohn. New Orleans cop Lieutenant J. Picot arrives, braces St.. Cyr and closes the establishment. Standing nearby is a piano player from the fancy parlor next door, the young Ferdinand LeMenthe, later to be better know as Jelly Roll Morton. Not too long thereafter a street urchin finds St. Cyr asleep at home. He is summoned to the nearby brothel by a madam, one Antonia Gonzales, because a of girl in the brothel has just been found dead. On her naked body lies a black rose. And so it has begun.

Rich in textures, gritty in tone, explicit in description, the reader is drawn quickly into the special and secret underworld of Storyville and its inhabitants, into the history and the fiction. This is a dark tale full of corruption, murder and madness. None of the inhabitants are pure. This is not a sunny tale of good guys versus bad guys, but it is an enthralling mix of real history and real mystery. Poisoned Pen Press is to be congratulated for publishing this first-rate novel.

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, May 2002

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