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Fiction

A Speculative Jazz Age Noir Brimming With Murder and Conspiracy

In Francis Spufford’s new novel, “Cahokia Jazz,” a detective must solve the mystery of a staged killing before its repercussions destroy his city’s social and political order.

In this illustration, the body of a dead man can be seen through a hole in a shattered window. Each shard of the window depicts a different scene, including: jazz musicians, a cable car in the snow, members of the Ku Klux Klan holding torches, two detectives and a person holding a Tommy gun.
Credit...Jérôme Berthier

Ivy Pochoda’s most recent novel is “Sing Her Down.”

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CAHOKIA JAZZ, by Francis Spufford


Reader, let me ask you a question. How much work are you willing to do to dive into a new novel? Do you want to step into a speculative world frustratingly close to our own? Do you want to spend time in an imaginary city constructed with the world-building minutiae of a high fantasy novel? Do you want to engage with new forms of government and religious sects? Are you cool if there’s foreign language peppered throughout? How about the Klan? A Red scare? A nascent F.B.I.? A love story? Do you also want jazz? And do you want all of this to be part of a detective novel?

Your answers to the above will dictate how much you buy into Francis Spufford’s new novel, “Cahokia Jazz.”

“Cahokia Jazz” presents an alternate America in which the variant of smallpox introduced to the United States during the Columbian Exchange was less deadly, conferred immunity after infection and didn’t decimate the Native population.

The story takes place in the 1920s, in a reimagined version of the ancient Indigenous city of Cahokia. In our real world, Cahokia was abandoned and all that’s left of the settlement are its famed mounds, which have become a UNESCO site; in Spufford’s alternate history, Cahokia grew into a booming 20th-century metropolis filled with Native, white and Black citizens — takouma, takata and taklousa in the language of the novel. The takouma are Catholic, having been converted in the early 17th century by a Jesuit priest clever enough to draw a straight line between the Holy Trinity and the Native religion. Cahokia is part of the Union, although the rest of the country seems lukewarm about its statehood. (Smallpox immunity aside, how these Native people managed to avoid white America’s genocidal imperative is a mystery mysteriously not part of the plot.)

One wintry night, Detective Joe Barrow, who is half-takouma and half-taklousa, and his takata partner, Phin Drummond, are summoned to examine a dead body on top of the Land Trust building in Cahokia. The victim is Fred Hopper, a takata with Klan affiliations who appears to have been murdered in a ritualized killing that seems to be styled after ancient Aztec sacrifices. Is this an actual ritualistic murder or is it a political setup to frame the city’s Catholic takouma as idol-worshiping savages in a complicated attempt to undermine them in the eyes of white America? It’s going to take a 400-page trip through every corner and gin joint in town to find out.

Barrow, new in town and unfamiliar with the Native language (too much is made of this fact), traverses every inch of Cahokia, from the takata shanties where he’s unwelcome to the predominantly takata Union Club, where he’s also unwelcome. He’ll talk up the case with the city’s takouma leaders in smoky jazz clubs. He’ll take fire from several Tommy guns and flee a Klan rally. He’ll be forced to consider, and then reconsider, the city’s nebulous racial alliances and question the morals of members of his own police force. And, in the tradition of any decent noir, he’ll find himself falling for the wrong woman.


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