Downtown Strut

An Edna Ferber Mystery #4

by Ed Ifkovic

"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.

Genres: Mystery, Historical

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

AKA Edward Ifkovic

Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades, and now, retired, devotes himself to writing fiction. His short stories and essays have appeared in such diverse periodicals as the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and the Journal of Popular Culture. He’s published fiction with small presses, including a novel based on the life of Victorian poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. 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. When he was fourteen, bored on a lazy summer afternoon, his mother handed him a copy of Edna Ferber’s Cimarron—for him, a riveting Western about the settling of Oklahoma and the discovery of oil—and he stayed up until three in the morning, until, bleary-eyed, he finished the novel.

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ifkovic does a nice job here realistically portraying the tension between the new voices struggling to emerge during the Harlem Renaissance and the white entertainment establishment that is both barrier and patron. You won't find any after-school-special-type monologues that reflect our more appropriate modern racial attitudes, which works well in the context because it points so plainly to just how post-racial we aren't in the 21st century.

[Cee James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll keep this simple. I love New York City, Harlem, and Show Boat (though I have only seen the movie musical) so these things drew me to this book. I really liked it and am considering reading other books by this author.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ifkovic develops yet another mystery around Edna Ferber at the time of the Broadway openings of two of her Broadway hits... SHOW BOAT (based on her novel) and THE ROYAL FAMILY (co-written with George S Kaufman) after Christmas in 1927.
On top of that, he sets the story in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance in the 20's. Peppered as usual with notables of the era: Jed Harris; Langston Hughes, Edna sets off to track down the killer.
This is my 10th Edna Ferber Mystery and I see no others so I guess I have no other option but to read the source material for these stories and pick up an Edna Ferber novel!!

[David Marshall · Rating 1 out of 5]

Although the book is well-written as a piece of prose and has a male author making a reasonably credible attempt to write a first-person narrative as a woman, I found it almost unreadable. When a modern author sets out to write a book that inevitably confronts the racism of earlier times, he needs a clear plan of how to handle the obviously sensitive issues. In my opinion, this book fails to evince a coherent condemnation of the behaviour of the people on display. When writing a "historical" novel, I don't believe it's morally acceptable to write a book describing racist attitudes and behaviour uncritically. Even when writing in the first-person as a character who might not have seen anything seriously wrong with what people were saying or doing, we should be given a subtext commentary to reflect our modern sensibilities.

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