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BLACK ORCHID BLUES
by Persia Walker
Akashic, April 2011
270 pages
$15.95
ISBN: 1936070901


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The evening that Harlem society columnist Lanie Price interviews Queenie Lovetree, the new singing sensation at the Cinnamon Club, the drag star is kidnapped on stage and several members of the audience killed in a blood bath. Since Lanie was formerly a crime reporter for another Harlem newspaper, she cannot resist playing amateur detective to find all on her own who has kidnapped the "Black Orchid" (as the star billed himself) and why. Her involvement in the case intensifies when, seemingly by mistake, she receives a box with Queenie's severed finger and a note addressed to a family who live across the street from her.

The novel falls squarely into the "They were right" school of mystery writing. At each step, her newspaper editor, Sam Delaney, warns her to go to the police. The Irish police detective John Blackie, with whom she has great rapport, begs her to be open with him. At each step Lanie convinces herself that the situation demands she act on her own — even after she realizes that the bizarre string of coincidences cannot really be such. Several more people are murdered. Each time Lanie feels remorse for her actions, before barreling into her next perilous adventure.

The ingenious plot takes one unexpected turn after another as it builds to its horrifying resolution. Nothing has been what it seemed. The killer has been the biggest victim of all, a dupe of birth and upbringing, now plotting the ultimate double-cross. Of the killer's "heinous actions," Lanie says, "I did find them understandable." Will the reader? What each person brings to the novel determines whether the psychopath will be viewed as a genuine case study or a plot ploy.

Various other genres blend into the mystery. It is a historical novel, set in February of 1928, during the Harlem Renaissance. We get the expected roll-call of names and see a number of the real society figures in person. It is also a romance. The widowed Lanie allows herself to feel the beginnings of a sexual attraction towards her editor. Though Lanie herself shows how the author has prepared the reader for the transformation, still it comes as a surprise when the novel also segues into a horror story with a disconcerting touch of the supernatural about it.

In the electronic information age, one would expect the historical research to be better. It's a minor thing when Broadway stars Tallulah Bankhead, Beatrice Lillie, and Clifton Webb are labeled "Hollywood A-listers." But it bothers me when Lanie says her bookshelf contains a copy of LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER, since the book was published in Italy in 1928, declared obscene by U.S. Customs, and probably not on a society columnist's bookshelf in Harlem. And I really blanched when Lanie tells me she's read Zora Neale Hurston's novel THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD "three times already." The novel was first published in 1937.

This was my first novel by Walker. I had high hopes. It comes with endorsements from Alafair Burke, Lee Child, Reed Farrel Coleman, Gar Anthony Haywood, S.J. Rozan, and Jason Starr. It is Walker's third mystery, her second to feature Lanie Price. The columnist appeared first in DARKNESS AND THE DEVIL BEHIND ME, 2008. The author's first novel was HARLEM REDUX, 2002; two RTE reviewers gave it generally favorable notices. I confess I'm not tempted to try another.

§ Drewey Wayne Gunn is professor emeritus of Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He is currently editing a collection of scholarly essays on 1960s GAY PULP FICTION: THE FORGOTTEN HERITAGE.

Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, May 2011

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