Podcast
Fresh Air
Maureen Corrigan reviewed the novel as a hardboiled detective story set in an alternate 1920s America where the Cahokia civilization survived, noting its noir atmosphere and richly detailed worldbuilding.
Novelist Frances Spafford's latest work of alternative historical fiction is called Cahokia Jazz. It's a hardboiled detective novel that imagines an America where Native Americans flourished and exert...
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Episode: The Migrant Crisis In NYC
Maureen Corrigan reviewed the novel as a hardboiled detective story set in an alternate 1920s America where the Cahokia civilization survived, noting its noir atmosphere and richly detailed worldbuilding.
Novelist Frances Spafford's latest work of alternative historical fiction is called Cahokia Jazz. It's a hardboiled detective novel that imagines an America where Native Americans flourished and exerted political power.
Much of the action of Frances Spafford's latest novel, Cahokia Jazz, plays out in the shadows, beginning with its opening scene. At first glance, a classic noir tableau. On a wet night, two police detectives stand on the roof of a downtown office building and stare at the corpse of a white man splayed out on a skylight.
The skylight the victim was bound to with rope is shaped like a pyramid. In another city, that would be a curious but relatively inconsequential detail. But this is Cahokia. In this city, the gutting of a white man atop a pyramid harkens back to Aztec ritual sacrifices and by extension, the indigenous civilization that once flourished in the area.
As he's done in his previous historical novels, Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, Spufford layers this novel with period details. Here he supplies fictitious maps, backstories and historical documents allegedly authored by Jesuit missionaries and founding fathers.
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.