I read this book for the Vintage Mystery Bingo ReadingChallenge 2014. The challenge is to read 6 or more Vintage Mysteries. All
novels must have been originally written before 1960 and be from the mystery
category.
I read this for G-1: Read a Book with a Color in the
title
Blues for the Prince – Bart Spicer, 1950
Published in the early Fifties, this hardboiled mystery
was the second in a series of about a dozen novels starring Philadelphia PI
Carney Wilde. Wilde investigates a murder among the members of a band that
still plays hot jazz (aka Dixieland) in the face of up-and-coming bebop.
Admittedly, this novel has little action or detecting, but its setting, scenes
and characterization make this an outstanding read. It is included on many
“best mystery” lists (such as here and here).
Spicer was a journalist so that implies he valued an
organized plot and fluent understandable language. His style is neither simple
like James Cain nor complex like Raymond Chandler, but he strikes a balance
between concise and excessively articulate. His dialogue is authentically
hard-boiled without being cheesy (Cain’s failing, on his bad days), and his
similes and metaphors are not self-conscious or over the top (Chandler’s
failing, at times). The character of Wilde doesn’t crack wise nor is he given
to mordant urban folk wisdom. His portrait of the weary homicide detective is
realistic and humane.
Interesting to readers who like music would be the asides
about Early Jazz, the kind of music that Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and Joe
Oliver played. Obviously, in a book about jazz, race is an unavoidable topic.
Spicer makes clear that among the musicians, it was not an issue compared to
the artistic judgments of “plays good music” versus “plays lame music.” The
critic for the New York Herald Tribune Book Review said that Spicer does an
"excellent job . . . showing the relationship between whites and Negroes
both in the unbiased world of jazz and the more deeply biased outside world."
Major: I am making a dedicated effort to go back and take a peek at everyone's reviews for the Vintage Challenge. Sorry it's taken me so long to get here.
ReplyDeleteI like the jazz theme to this one. I'm not a usual fan of hard-boiled style--but this definitely sounds like it's worth reading.