The Jazz Bird by
Craig Holden
This is the book that Craig Holden has been promising to write since his
knock-out debut The River Sorrow (1994). Abandoning the present day,
first person/ present tense and male viewpoints that have characterised
most of his work to date, he weaves a mesmerising, multi-voiced tale
around the real-life murder in 1927 of "the Jazz Bird", Imogene Rebus,
by her husband, bootlegger George Remus.
Remus was a major figure ("the Carnegie of whiskey") in 1920s America,
a former criminal lawyer who spotted the legal holes in the Volstead
Act, the act of Congress that led to the Prohibition Era, and used them
to achieve staggering financial success ($40m in three years, around
$800m in today’s terms, according to one account) selling illegal whisky
from his base in Cincinnati.
We first meet him as he staggers, dazed,
from the park where he has just shot his wife, demanding that he be
taken to "the station." He is amused when taken to Cincinnati’s Dixie
Train Terminal rather than to the police station that he really wanted.
But before long, claiming "justified homicide" and temporary insanity,
he is mounting his own vigorous defence. The prosecuting team is led by
Charlie Taft, second son of the former US President. For Charlie, early
in his career, this is an important case which could mean a life spent
either in obscurity or at the highest peaks of public life. But Charlie
has access, not only to witness statements and court depositions, but to
Imogene’s personal diaries...
Here Holden improves on the technique he used, to great effect, in the
previous Four Corners of Night
(1999- a narrative told in the present but combining events from both
the past and present. As the trial proceeds, blow by counter blow, the
novelist takes us into the past, interventions triggered not only by
events in court, but also by the thoughts and memories of the characters
of the book, sometimes by the diaries themselves. Beautifully written
in pared-down often spine-tingling prose, Holden in particular creates
(for the reality was more prosaic) the courtship, marriage and early
life of Imogene and George Remus, throwing off hints of Fitzgerald’s
Gatsby (or should that be Gatsby’s Daisy?) as he does so.
At the centre is Imogene, the Jazz Bird herself, rejecting the formal
strictures of her high society upbringing, helplessly attracted to the
existential impetuosity of Remus himself, fleeing eventually to the arms
of Frank Dodge, the law enforcer set on destroying Remus’s bootleg
empire. In the process Holden offers a dazzling reinterpretation of the
facts of the case, one more consistent with Imogene’s wholehearted
embrace of the new freedoms offered by the coming of the Jazz Age.
Three books in one then - a fascinating court case, the outcome always
in doubt, a story of passion and amour fou, and a mystery that probes
the deep recesses of the human heart. The best book I’ve read this year.
One for the Dagger short-list?
 | |
