Podcast
Fresh Air
A historical novel set in an alternate 1922 America, intertwining a vanished city's legacy with a murder mystery.
In Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin. He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about th...
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A historical novel set in an alternate 1922 America, intertwining a vanished city's legacy with a murder mystery.
In Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin. He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder.
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The episode described it as a hardboiled detective novel set in an alternate 1920s America where Native Americans flourished, noting its noir style, detailed worldbuilding and a vision of democracy under strain.
Novelist Frances Spufford's latest work of alternative historical fiction is called Cahokia Jazz. It's a hardboiled detective novel that imagines an America where Native Americans weren't decimated by smallpox brought over by Europeans, but rather flourished and exerted political power.
Maureen Corrigan says that its vision of democracy straining at the seams looks awfully familiar.
Much of the action of Frances Spufford's latest novel, Cahokia Jazz, plays out in the shadows, beginning with its opening scene. At first glance, a classic noir tableau.
In Spufford's mashup of noir with alternative history, however, the lost city of Cahokia endured and evolved into a modern metropolis whose indigenous, white, and AfricanAmerican populations live in cautious harmony.
Spufford even draws upon an old trade jargon to flesh out a language, Anopa, that's used in Cahokia, and he scatters phrases liberally throughout the novel.