Undertones

Stephanie Stone Nancy

Description

Undertones is a ground-breaking reference book on jazz in crime fiction. As the opening historical overview shows, crime and jazz are soulmates in popular (especially American) culture and this book is by far the most exhaustive - but also entertaining survey of the interaction of both. The book is divided into two parts. The first is comprised of essays framing some of the jazz crime novels in their historical context and giving the casual reader a better understanding of the genre. Essays on ragtime and the blues offer insight into jazz roots. Other essays are regional (New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City, San Francisco, Los Angeles (black & white)), or set abroad. Four essays are topical: Private Eyes and Jazz ('Jazz Eyes'), Cops and Jazz, Jazz and Drugs, and Jazz in Spy and Thriller novels. The second part consists of an annotated bibliography of books, short stories and magazines as well as lists of: authors and their series characters, series characters and their authors

Informations

• Publié par: Galileo Publishing
• Date de parution: 14 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912916955
• Langue: English

Extrait

Galileo Publishers
16 Woodlands Road
Great Shelford Cambridge
CB22 5LW UK
www.galileopublishing.co.uk
Distributed in the USA by:
SCB Distributors
15608 S. New Century Drive
Gardena, CA 90248-2129
ISBN 978-1-912916-48-1
© 2022 Nancy-Stephanie Stone
Cover illustration © 2022 Ophelia Redpath
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed in the EU



Introduction
Part 1
Jazz Roots:
1. Ragtime
2. The Blues
Regional & Other Mysteries
Jazz: New Orleans
Jazz: Kansas City
Crime and Jazz in Chicago
Jazz and Crime in The Big Apple
West Coast: L.A. Jazz
West Coast Jazz: The Other L.A. (Central Avenue)
West Coast Jazz: San Francisco
Jazz Mysteries Abroad—An Overview
“Jazz Eyes”
Cops and Jazz
Jazz and Drugs
Jazz Spies and Thrillers

Part 2
Authors & Their Series Characters
Series Characters & Authors
Books & Short Stories By Authors
Jazz Discography
Chronology
Locations
Hot One Hundred (Personal Favorites)
Jazz Books by Authors
Addenda


For Marc Levin & Richard Reynolds and The Three Amigas
With thanks.
In memory of Barbara Davey, editor & Christian von Hessart, publisher of The Mystery Review .



“Somewhere…is the solution to the world…If we could only find it,” says Coffin Ed Johnson listening to the trumpet and saxophone conversation at Big Wilt’s Small Paradise Inn in Harlem.
Grave Digger Jones replies: “The emotion that comes out of experience. If we could read that language, man, we would solve all the crimes in the world.”
-----Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones on crime and jazz in Chester Himes’ Cotton Comes to Harlem (p.33).
Undertones
Undertones is a reference book on jazz in crime fiction. A few ragtime and blues novels as well as a play are also included. Ragtime was a forerunner of jazz, and many of the great early jazz musicians started out playing ragtime. The blues, on the other hand, shared a common root with jazz, and developed separately into what might be considered the dark side of jazz.
As this historical overview shows, crime and jazz are soul mates in American popular culture. An early relationship began in the taverns, brothels and sporting houses of Storyville, the red-light district in New Orleans. David Fulmer’s Valentin St. Cyr series: Chasing the Devil’s Tail (2001), Jass (2005), Rampart Street (2006), Lost River (2009), The Iron Angel (2014), Eclipse Alley (2017) and The Day Ends at Dawn (2019) depicts this relationship during Storyville’s heyday and demise. After the Navy closed Storyville in 1917, the jazz musicians went up the Mississippi River by steamboat or took the Illinois Central railroad to Chicago to play in gangster-owned clubs (Roddy Doyle, Oh, Play That Thing ! 2004). A few musicians and local gangsters stayed behind in New Orleans. But as Robert Skinner’s 1930s series about club owner Wesley Farrell shows ( Blood to Drink (2000), Cat-Eyed Trouble (1998), Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1999), Pale Shadow (2001), Skin Deep, Blood Red (1997) and The Righteous Cut (2002)), the jazz scene barely survived.
Jazz gave its name in the 1920s to a decade associated with excitement and lawlessness. In the Jazz Age, Americans were not going to allow the passage of the 18 th Amendment in 1920, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, stand in the way of good times. While accompanied by jazz, they danced the Charleston on tabletops in gangster-owned nightclubs and drank bootleg whiskey in “speakeasies”. In 1920s New York City, there were an estimated 5,000 speakeasies.
Jazz wasn’t limited to a particular locality. For example, in Loren D. Estleman’s Whiskey River (1990), speakeasy jazz provides the background and tempo to gangster Jack Danzig’s rise and fall in the Detroit underworld. In Pamela Longfellow’s China Blues (1989), the Tea Pot Dome Scandal is hatched at San Francisco’s infamous Blue Canary Club where King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band provides background music.
In the 1920s jazz moved out of bars and smoky backrooms into society. At one of the legendary Long Island weekend lawn parties given by the bootlegger Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), the King of Swing Vladimir Tostoff plays his composition, “The Jazz History of The World”, modeled on the jazz played by Paul Whiteman at his 1924 Carnegie Hall Concert. Imogene Remus, the wife of the bootlegger George Remus in Craig Holden’s The Jazz Bird (2001), hired the most popular band in Chicago, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, for her parties. Accompanied by a black jazz band that plays loud enough to cover the sound of a pistol shot, Catherine Jones, an Alabama socialite, does a wild Charleston in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s little known short story, “The Dance” (1926).
Michael Walsh’s And all the Saints (2001) is a fictional biography of gangster Owney Madden, who owned Harlem’s famous Cotton Club where the Duke Ellington Orchestra was in residence. It reflects organized crime’s understanding of the 1920s and their hold on the entertainment business. Aside from the financial aspects, many gangsters liked jazz. For a while, gangster Dutch Schultz “owned” Louis Armstrong. In trying to escape from the clutches of Schultz, he was shanghaied by two lesser mobsters, Tommy Rockwell and Johnny Collins. Armstrong’s problems with the mob appear in Roddy Doyle’s Oh! Play That Thing (2004).
On Thursday, October 24, 1929, known as “Black Thursday,” the bottom fell out of the Wall Street stock market, ending the Jazz Age. An economic depression began that would eventually put one out of every four Americans out of work and would last until the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, resulting in a war and an eventual economic recovery.
In spite of economic hardship, people found the money for a night-out for dancing. In 1933, the passage of the 21 st Amendment repealing Prohibition insured that there was plenty of alcohol for everyone. The Charleston gave way to the jitterbug. In New York, dancehalls and gangster owned nightclubs, like the Savoy with Chick Webb’s Orchestra and the Cotton Club with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, were packed with people wanting to dance and drink their troubles away. In New York City, an entire street block on 52 nd Street, known as Swing Street, was filled with jazz clubs. H. Paul Jeffers’ private eye Harry McNeil ( Murder On Mike , 1984), ( Rubout at The Onyx , 1981) and ( The Rag Doll Murder , 1987) had an office on 52 nd Street above the Onyx Club. It wasn’t just in New York City. Across the country, in places like Chicago (Jonathan Latimer’s The Lady in the Morgue , 1936), Seattle (Harlan Reed’s The Swing Music Murder , 1938), Kansas City (Lise McClendon’s One O’clock Jump , 2001) and Harper Barnes’ Blue Monday , 1991), clubs were packed with patrons and private detectives. As Lou Cameron’s Angel’s Flight (1960) shows, the mob decided which bands would get the bookings that allowed them to succeed.
In the 1940s the jazz scene changed, as did gangster control of the music business. With the exception of Duke Ellington, who was too old, and Benny Goodman, who had spine problems, most of the top jazz bandleaders disbanded their civilian bands and went to war. Artie Shaw led an all-star Navy Band, while Glenn Miller headed up a combined Army-Air Force Band. (Miller, whose song “ In the Mood” epitomized the era, would die in an airplane over the English Channel.) A series of flashbacks in Peter Robinson’s In a Dry Season (2000) shows just how important big band jazz was in the war effort. But, as Loren Estleman’s Jitterbug (1998) shows, the home front still offered opportunities for gangsters to make money.
One of the casualties of World War II was big band jazz. In the war’s aftermath popular taste changed. Maybe the songs that were so evocative of the era reminded people of that last dance with someone who didn’t return. Whatever the reason, the difficulty of meeting a payroll along with the increasing costs of keeping a band on the road and shrinking audiences led many bandleaders like Count Basie to reduce the size of their bands. Other lesser-known orchestras simply disbanded.
An element from the big jazz bands that did survive and prosper was the band vocalist. The vocalist’s role evolved from singing a few choruses to entire songs. Finally, vocalists took center stage. A few, like the skinny singer from Hoboken, New Jersey with Tommy Dorsey’s band, Frank Sinatra, went on to careers in Hollywood. As was the case with the jazz bands, organized crime often decided who was going to succeed (e.g. Walker Alise in Richard Jessup’s Lowdown , 1958) and who wasn’t (e.g. Carl Carlson, the Carolina Crooner, in J. Madison Davis’ And the Angels Sing , 1995). In one rare case, an indefinable relationship between a singer (Frank Sinatra) and organized crime figures continued throughout the singer’s long career. Robert J. Randisi’s light-hearted Eddie Gianelli novels ( Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime (2006), Luck Be A Lady , Don’t Die (2007), Hey There (You With The Gun In Your Hand) (2008), You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Kills You (2009), I’m A Fool To Kill You (2010), Fly Me to the Morgue (2011), It Was a Very Bad Year (2012), You Make Me Feel So Dead (2013), The Way You Die Tonight (2014) and When Somebody Kills You (2015)) depicts Sinatra and his friends’ (“the Rat Pack”) antics (real and imagined) at the Sands Hotel in 1960s Las Vegas.
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