The Dark Side of the Jazz Age

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If you wish, you can blame it on The Great Gatsby. The 1920s have always seemed to carry a sheen of glamour. Daisy Buchanan’s beauty, Jay Gatsby’s wealth, the Great Neck mansions, it all dazzled readers so intensely that they didn’t quite grasp the ugliness of a car running down a woman in the road and a man shot in his own swimming pool.

From the book: “Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ ” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.  ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.’ ”

Yes, interestingly, Daisy cries over the gorgeous shirts, and almost 100 years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, the darkness of the 1920s, the feverish decade following a world war and the Spanish Flu pandemic, comes more into focus. The figures of the flapper and the flask, symbols of Prohibition, ride like hood ornaments on Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce. But more and more people are peering under the hood. In the celebrated Jazz Age, there was virulent racism, political repression targeting radicals and unions, deep corruption that reached all the way to the White House, and of course the consuming greed that ratcheted ever higher until the Crash of 1929.

Three works of nonfiction written in the last decade tell important truths the 1920s: The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America, written by Daniel Okrent, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis, by Adam Hochschild, and Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, written by David Grann and adapted into a soon-to-be-released film by Martin Scorsese.

In fiction, a burst of mystery novels set in the 1920s hit bookshelves several years ago and that trend is deepening with crime fiction and other books that are more and more grappling with disturbing issues of the “Roaring Twenties.” In my novel, The Orchid Hour, the protagonist is a young Italian American widow dealing with prejudice in New York City who follows the trail of two strange deaths to the door of a nightclub in Greenwich Village, one displaying rare orchids and serving forbidden cocktails, that holds secrets of violence and corruption.

Here are 12 other books that look at the grit beneath the glamour of the 1920s. As we struggle to recover from a pandemic in 2023, the decade has a definite resonance.

Broadway Butterfly by Sarah Divello

This novel dives into the real unsolved murder of 29-year-old model Dorothy King, a case that inspired the classic film The Naked City. In 1923, King’s lifeless body was found in the bedroom of a brownstone on West Fifty-Seventh, wearing only a silk chemise, a chloroform bottle beside her. The investigation of King’s life by police and journalists lays bare the precarious existence of New York City beauties who, even if they sashayed across Ziegfeld’s stage, earned little money and all too often ended up financed by sugar daddies or gangsters.

 Murder in the Park by Jeanne M. Dams

An Italian antique dealer is murdered, and Elizabeth Fairchild, a widow living with her parents in Oak Park, Illinois, begins to investigate the death of her friend. It might sound like to plot of many a historical mystery, but Dams reveals the historic bigotry beneath the surface of idyllic Oak Park, specifically the conservative and Protestant Walosas Club, which is connected to an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy Egan

Speaking of the Ku Klux Kan, this nonfiction book reveals the shocking reach of the white supremacy group, with numerous elected officials, doctors and dentists, police, and community leaders assaulting and killing people at night—while busy “giving out money to churches and charities” during the day. Today many people associate the Harlem Renaissance with the Jazz Age, but the ugly reality is that the Klan, which sputtered out a decade after the Civil War, came roaring back fifty years later to seize real political power in the 1920s across the United States.

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

While there was no Prohibition in Great Britain, nightclubs flourished and set the scene for the country’s own version of the Jazz Age, with celebrants desperate to escape their memories of the Great War. The most fascinating character is nightlife queen Nellie Coker–inspired by the famed 1920s club owner Kate Meyrick—but there are many other compelling characters in this gorgeously written novel that some critics have dubbed “Dickensian.”

A Botanist’s Guide to Flowers and Fatality by Kate Khavari

Another mystery set in England in the 1920s comes from Khavari, following up her successful debut, A Botanist’s Guide to Parties and Poison. The protagonist is Saffron Everleigh, a young woman who disdains her aristocratic background for a career in botany. Her impressive skills are put to use in a murder investigation that uncovers the dependance on narcotics flourishing among the fabulous set in London—and other big cities in the 1920s.

The Last Drop of Hemlock by Katharine Schellman

The role of women in speakeasys is fascinating, whether it is the customers (women did not commonly socialize in bars pre-Prohibition) or the employees. Vivian Kelly, the protagonist, lives in a humble tenement while working as a waitress in the Nightingale when she decides to investigate the suspicious death of the club’s doorman. Her questions lead her deeper into the world of gangsters who formed an integral aspect of Prohibition nightlife.

The Mistress of Bahtia House, by Sujata Massey

Protagonist Perveen Mistry, a Parsi, is a quintessentially modern character in this award-winning series. As Bombay’s only woman solicitor, she resolutely deals with discrimination in all forms, ranging from clients unwilling to entrust their fate to a female to judges who won’t allow her to approach. But in the fourth book in the series, Mistry also must do battle with cultural condemnation of women who do not seem “pure” enough. And a serious antagonistic source is the British, who impose their will unfairly at every level of society.  World War One destroyed the Hapsburg and Romanov empires, but the British empire survived and tightened its grip in the 1920s, primarily in India.

Nothing but the Night: Leopold & Loeb and the Truth Behind the Murder That Rocked 1920s’ America,
by Greg King and Penny Wilson

It became fashionable to proclaim that the amoral 1920s with its worship of modernity and taste for Nietzsche were to blame for motivating rich young Chicagoans Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to take the life of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in what seemed a senseless act. This nonfiction book de-mythologizes the well-educated, diffident duo, taking a deep look at their psychology along with providing a fascinating analysis of their defense waged by Clarence Darrow.

Jazzed, by Jill Dearman

Inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case, Dearman switched genders and altered the setting from Chicago to New York while keeping the pair precocious and Jewish and setting the story in 1924. The result is a page turner that delves into matters both dark (the dangerous science of eugenics that helped fuel anti-immigrant fervor) and light (the intoxication of jazz music) while making it painfully clear that if you were young and gay, you felt compelled to hide it from family, teachers, and the world during this seeming period of free love.

Death Comes to Santa Fe, by Amanda Allen

In the 1920s, progressives sometimes left the big city to set up communities across America, and such is the case in Allen’s mystery series. Solving the mystery is set against the interesting tensions caused by arts-minded modern young people who’ve arrived in Santa Fe, which during the time of the plot is caught up in the community’s annual festival of bonfires commemorating a Spanish governor who marched into town several centuries earlier.

Murder Off Stage by Mary Miley

In the 1920s the Palace Theatre was the Times Square nerve center for vaudeville and there were others catering to the most popular form of live entertainment in the United States. In this mystery, protagonist Jessie Beckett is a vaudeville performer turned movie script girl, which was a shrewd trajectory in 1926, when vaudeville had only a few years of popularity left and the film industry was on the verge of “talkies.” The mystery is packed with real people of this captivating world, which had its shadowy secrets far from the spotlights.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This is not crime fiction but a fantasy inspired by Mexican folklore. Still, it deserves special attention for not just the imaginative plot driven by the mysteries of Mayan legend but the richly rendered and historically researched details that decisively place the story in the 1920s, a decade that saw Prohibition and Wall Street in America affect its neighbor, from Merida to Veracruz to Tijuana, where “Lady Temperance had no abode.” As Silvia Moreno-Garcia astutely says, “A country in flux is a country padded with opportunities.”

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