The Axeman’s Jazz,
the first in Ray Celestin’s City Blues Quartet, won the CWA New Blood Dagger
for best debut crime novel and it was a well deserved accolade. It was
exciting, original, densely evocative of a fascinating time and place, suffused
with the rhythms of rudimentary 1910s jazz when Louis Armstrong – a character
in the book – took his first steps towards immortality. The second in the
quartet, Dead Man’s Blues, picked up the same central characters a
decade on, in 1920s Chicago, the era of Al Capone, the moment when, with the
magnificent West End Blues, Satchmo changed jazz forever.
Now, the third in the series, The Mobster’s Lament, jumps
forward to the 1940s in New York, when Charlie Bird Parker and Dizzy Gillespier
were inventing bebop and jazz was preparing for its next, stunning
metamorphosis.
The central pairing of Ida Davis, a private detective and a black woman
who could pass for white – often, alas, a distinct advantage in those days –
and Michael Talbot, a former New Orleans police chief, remain. They are older,
of course, and Michael, in particular is not the man he was. Retired and his body
ageing, he is no longer suited to the hectic, violent world still inhabited by
Ida. Unfortunately, though, he is hurled back into it when his son is arrested
and charged with four brutal – possibly voodoo-related – murders in a seedy
flophouse. Michael knows he is innocent but the case against him seems watertight.
Curiously watertight.
He calls on Ida, his old friend and colleague, to assist, and they
begin an investigation which takes them into the heart of 1940s gangsterdom,
with passing visits to the jazz bars in which Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and Miles
Davis were beginning their experiments with the very structure of music.
A parallel plot features a Mafia fixer, Gabriel Leveson, who has a
secret of his own – he has been salting away Mob money for years and has
planned his imminent escape. Before he can put the plan into action, however,
he too is drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse when he is ordered by a Mafia
boss to track down a missing $1 million. Gradually, violently, the stories of
Ida and Michael and Gabriel converge.
As always with Ray Celestin, there is a mindboggling amount of plot.
You would do well to read this fast, as you will lose track of characters and
events otherwise. And the other signature traits of Celestin are also present –
the vivid historical detail, the periodic, very violent crime, the beautiful overlaying
of the history of jazz, here told through Satchmo in his wilderness years and
through the tyros setting the bebop clubs on fire.
It is perhaps fifty or sixty pages too long. There are some longeurs
and repetitions and sometimes the detail becomes almost photographic, but this
is a failing so many writers succumb to as their careers progress. Take
virtually any writer and track the average page count from first novel to last
and you see the same thing. Oh, for an editor who could take writers in hand
and tell them to cut the verbiage.
But, for all that, this is a great read. Fast-paced, exciting, very
well written and with characters who feel alive and vibrant, with all their
failings and foibles, their strengths and their fears. Once you start, you’re
unlikely to finish until the final page is turned.
The fourth and final novel is due to be set in Los Angeles in 1967. The
sixties was the era when bebop was being overtaken by free jazz, John Coltrane,
Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders et al. That’s my favourite jazz
period and I can’t wait to read it.
