A Death In Harlem

A Death In Harlem by Karla Holloway

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Pre-order Links: Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Book Depository | Indie Bound

Blurb:

A Death in Harlem is a mystery set in the midst of the 1920s Harlem elite with a perplexing death at its center and Harlem’s first colored policeman poised to uncover the the relationship between the help, the privileged members of secret and no-so-secret Negro clubs, and the enigmatic white man whose relationship to (and interests in) the Harlem hold is key to the mystery.

Review:

Let’s start with all the things I loved about this book. There were a lot of things to love about it. I was excited to see this cross section of Black life during an era I know so little about. When I see histories of this era, they tend to focus on white Americans. If Black Americans are mentioned at all, they’re mentioned as a monolith, one giant monoculture stretching from California to Maine, and that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Holloway cuts away the veil general history books like to put on Black culture and shows the stratification of Harlem society in this particular time and place. We see the challenges faced by professionals and working-class residents, by wealthy and poor alike. We see the difficulty of “respectability” and the fragility of reputation.

We see the dangerousness of passing, and of tokenism.

We do get a murder, and if you read this blog on anything like a regular basis you know how I feel about that sort of thing. We also do have a brief but important sexual relationship between two women, although this book is in no way, shape, or form a romance.

Holloway did a fantastic job of showing us a world I will never see. Her characters’ voices were unique and well-developed, and I could relate to most of them despite a good century between us. I absolutely adored Welton, and Sadie the nascent church lady. I wept for Vera, and for Hughes.

Unfortunately, there were several issues with the book. The first seems minor and pedantic, but it happened often enough that it threw me out of the story. It’s not even entirely the author’s fault.

There were so many typesetting errors, and little punctuation errors, that it was sometimes difficult to tell who was speaking at any given point in time. There were no line breaks for dialogue, and sometimes no quotation marks. If it happens here and there – well, these things happen. But if it happens over and over, it confuses the reader and makes it impossible to become fully immersed in the story. And if you’re trying to read a murder mystery, and someone is giving evidence, it’s important to know exactly who is speaking to whom.

EDIT: I’ve been informed by a reliable source that what I received was an uncorrected proof and these issues will be fixed in the final copy, which will be out in September. Which is awesome, and will make it much easier to lose yourself in this world.

Which brings me to my second point. The book is billed as literary fiction, which isn’t my wheelhouse. (They promised murder, okay?)  I understand that some things are allowable in lit fic that would get your book rejected in genre fiction. This book has a lot of head hopping. The author employs a lot of POV shifts, from third person limited to third person omniscient to first person singular and back again.

It’s possible to pull that off. Toni Morrison did it well. So did William “WTF Is Wrong With White People” Faulkner, for what it’s worth. In both of those cases, the POV shifts are essential to revealing something about the characters and how they’re changing with the story. Think Darl in As I Lay Dying.*

This book didn’t quite rise to that same level. Instead of showing character growth and development, the POV and tense changes just made the book feel choppy. Pacing was also an issue, with the beginning feeling slow and ponderous and the end reading like a telenovela.

In all honesty, I did thoroughly enjoy A Death In Harlem. I was torn about how to rate it. I loved the story. There was never any point where I didn’t care about what was happening on the page. I always felt deeply invested in what was going on. The structural issues irritated me, sometimes to the point of cursing, but it didn’t put me off long enough to lose interest in the plot.

If you’re someone who gets annoyed by some of the conventions of literary fiction, this might not be the book for you. It could use some more editing. But if you’re looking for a fine story with unique characters who will stick with you long after you’ve closed the book, you could do far worse than picking up a copy of A Death In Harlem.

* Try not to think about Darl too much. Or AILD. It’s not good for your health.