Jitterbuggin' with the Renaissance: A Jazz Age Thriller

by Don Swaim

At the height of the 1920s, mixed-race reporter Gart Asquith, protégé of H.L. Mencken, heads to New York to learn about the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. There, he mingles with gangsters, becomes pals with poet Countee Cullen, and falls in love with Zora Neale Hurston. Gart’s other capers include kidnapping Fats Waller to perform at Al Capone’s birthday party, risking arrest as a rumrunner out of Cuba, tracking down a serial killer in silent-screen Hollywood, and infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the major figures of the Jazz Age make cameos, including George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Shipwreck Kelly. All the while, Gart’s mentor Mencken, the era’s leading critic, unleashes his unfettered cynicism of politics, religion, and societal pretension.
The novel’s title relates to a poem by Langston Hughes, one of the major poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

Paperback

Published June 8, 2024

About the author

Don Swaim is a writer, novelist, journalist, and winner of the 2011 Pearl S. Buck short story prize. His novel, The H.L. Mencken Murder Case (St. Martin's Press), was republished as a trade paperback under the Authors Guild's Back in Print program. Born in Kansas and educated in Ohio, his daily feature "Book Beat" was broadcast on major radio stations through the CBS Radio Stations News Service, and can be heard on the Internet at Wired for Books and at Book Beat:The Podcast. After a career at CBS in New York and Baltimore, Swaim founded the Bucks County Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. He edits the web's definitive Ambrose Bierce Site. His fiction and articles have been published in small magazines and on the web.