Downtown Strut (Edna Ferber Mystery) - Hardcover

Ifkovic, Ed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1464201552 ISBN 13: 9781464201554

Verlag: POISONED PEN PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

"Fans of mysteries featuring literary figures as crime-solvers will thoroughly enjoy this series." —Booklist

It's 1927, and "the Ferber season on Broadway" is about to begin. The musical adaptation of Show Boat by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern opens on December 27, and The Royal Family, her comedy of manners written with George Kaufman, opens the following night. But despite the excitement, author Edna Ferber misses both opening nights. She has something else on her mind—murder.

Edna is fascinated by the Roaring Twenties' Harlem Renaissance. In fact, she has been mentoring some of these talented, young "Negro" writers and actors, among them her housekeeper's son, Waters Turpin, and the handsome, charismatic Roddy Parsons. She heads to Harlem to take Parsons to lunch, only to discover he's been stabbed to death in his bed.

Who would murder Roddy? Suspects include the writers who meet at Edna's apartment and the young producer Jed Harris, a darling of the Broadway set who is a notoriously cruel man. With the help of Waters Turpin, his mother, and poet Langston Hughes, Edna sets off to track down a dangerous killer.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades, and now devotes himself to writing fiction. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls his boyhood discovery of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world. DOWNTOWN STRUT is the fourth mystery in his Edna Ferber Mystery series for Poisoned Pen Press. Previous books are LONE STAR (2009).  ESCAPE ARTIST (2011), and MAKE BELIEVE (2012).

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Downtown Strut

An Edna Ferber Mystery

By Ed Ifkovic

Poisoned Pen Press

Copyright © 2013 Ed Ifkovic
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4642-0155-4

CHAPTER 1

As I stepped into my own living room, drawn by the excited hum of strange, eager voices, my eyes immediately caught those of a dark young man who stared back, his eyes wide and unblinking, a sloppy grin plastered on his face. I knew I'd met him before, and recently, though I had no idea where. So young—what? twenty-one, twenty-two?—with skin the color of rich mahogany, glistening and smooth. He wanted to say something to me because the carnival grin disappeared as he cleared his throat, but at that moment my housekeeper Rebecca nudged me from behind.

"Miss Edna, quite the motley bunch, no?" She laughed and nodded toward a skinny young boy who was now standing, a nervous smile on his lips.

"Mom," he began.

"Waters," Rebecca said in the same buttery chuckle, "where are your manners? You weren't raised in a barn."

I shifted my gaze from the young man with the sloppy grin to Rebecca's son, who started to stammer, "Miss Edna, I ..."

"Waters," I roared like a hectoring schoolmarm, "when I'm out of town you resettle the young population of Harlem in my apartment?" But my smile gave me away. Waters, like every other gangly seventeen-year-old boy in the world, stood all rawboned elbow and jerky wrist, bending and twisting, one foot tapping the floor.

I wasn't expected back in town for two more days, of course, but the arduous, though heady, tryouts for Show Boat had exhausted me. I'd checked out of my hotel early. Though the show was already headed back to New York, I'd originally planned on two days of idle shopping and lunches with friends in Philly. But I'd changed my mind.

Too many cities, each becoming a noisy blur.

I was thrilled that cosmopolitan Washington adored the new Hammerstein-Kern musical. My Lord, that first night it ran for over four hours, ending at 12:40 a.m., the audience on its feet, stomping, cheering, huzzahing. Not a soul left the theater. The excitement shook the rafters. I actually blushed, felt faint as I staggered up the aisles of the National Theater. The next morning the line for tickets circled the block. That was mid-November. We knew we had a hit on our hands.

From there the energized troupe moved to Pittsburgh's Nixon Theater, the musical now drastically and painfully cut, then on to Cleveland, and now ending a rip-roaring tryout at the Erlanger in Philadelphia. Show Boat would open on Broadway—a gigantic hit, everyone whispered to me—just two days after Christmas.

Foolishly, drunk on the show's evident success and awash in its riveting music and splendor, I'd become a camp follower, a schoolgirl with her first crush. It couldn't last. At one point I'd also rushed to Newark, New Jersey, and then to Atlantic City, where I watched the tryouts of The Royal Family, my comedy written with George S. Kaufman, scheduled to open in New York the day after Show Boat. It was dizzying, if wonderful.

Hidden in my hotel room, I'd become homesick, desperate for Manhattan and the quiet of my bedroom. So I boarded the train at Philly, bone weary and yet exhilarated, echoes of "Ol' Man River" reverberating in my head as the train clang-clanged into Penn Station. I wanted to be home, my door shut against the outside world. I'd lost my energy. All the pumped-up euphoria of two new shows, completed now and ready for the world to judge, left me enervated, down. It was like the morning after a successful party as you stare into your empty coffee cup and face the hollow day ahead.

When the doorman Joseph deferentially placed my suitcases inside my front door and I stepped into the living room, I didn't expect that gathering of startled, upturned Negro faces.

Waters walked toward me, half-bowed, and smiled. How much the slender, jittery little boy he seemed, with those thin shoulders and that long, stringy neck, the bony oval face with the narrow nutbrown eyes that blinked too much. A year away from college, he was a serious prep-school lad with Joe College crew-neck sweaters and starched Arrow shirts. And, he hoped, the life of a writer. "Miss Edna, you told my mother ..."

I held up my hand. "Waters, please. It's no matter." My smile tried to take them all in.

But the group shuffled in their seats, nervous, ready to leave, which seemed right.

"You look tired, Miss Edna." Rebecca leaned in, shaking her head. "I'll brew you a cup of tea and then settle you in." She smiled back at the young folks sitting there. "I think these poets have rhymed enough verse for one day."

Only Waters laughed out loud, but I noticed that the lanky lad with the infectious grin widened his eyes. It bothered me. How did I know him? Something about him seemed familiar, but that made no sense: my social circle of young Negroes in their early twenties was nonexistent, really. Tall, angular, yet with a slightly pudgy, bloated face, as though he'd never fully shaken off the last of his baby fat, he was not handsome but incredibly attractive. That deep mahogany hue, yet with a sprinkle of reddish freckles around his nose and eyes that gave him a mischievous look. The eyes, yes, they looked familiar. Slatted, almost Asian perhaps, the edges lined with darker ebony, so much so that it could be stage makeup, a chorus girl's kohl-rimmed look. An amalgam of hard and soft, that face: the rigidity of his jawline at war with the puffiness of his cheeks. A gentle boy, I thought, yet when he stared at me, the eyes looked steely and fierce. I was startled.

Waters was still apologizing.

Last summer, when Waters was visiting his mother and staying with relatives in New Jersey, he scooted in and out of my apartment, the soon-to-be high-school senior always in a hurry, stacks of library books clutched to his chest—or spilling out of the overstuffed briefcase he often carried, an old-timer's briefcase with buckles and clasps and weathered leather. One afternoon he confessed a desire to be a novelist, and though I had a professional writer's dread of the amateur short story cavalierly thrust at me, I asked to read something he'd written. The short narrative he'd given me described his dead grandfather, Rebecca's father, a colorful if eccentric man everyone called Captain Tom, a towering, gaunt patriarch with straightened black hair and a thick, whiskey voice. A good man, and beloved by Waters. The piece was crude and overblown, yet it had spark, energy, verve. So I encouraged the quiet boy to spend hours reading in my personal library. There were days he never seemed to look up from a book.

Then, wandering the city streets, especially up to Harlem in search of the young writers of the new Harlem Renaissance that everyone was talking about—capitalized now, so dubbed by the New York Herald Tribune—he'd become friendly with a small coterie of neophyte writers and actors, young men and women who hung out at the public library on Lenox Avenue, in the lobbies of the Lafayette and Lincoln Theaters, at St. Mark's A.M.E. Church on 138th and St. Nicholas Avenue, starry-eyed young folks who hungered to be a part of the throbbing, jazz-infused world of this Negro flowering—followers of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Wallace Thurman, writers not much older than they, in fact, but already established, celebrated.

Intrigued, caught by Waters' infectious excitement, I agreed to meet them one afternoon in my apartment—the first of two casual lunches I hosted. I found them...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: POISONED PEN PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1464201552
• ISBN 13: 9781464201554
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 246
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar