Cahokia Jazz

By Francis Spufford

Fiction/Faber & Faber/Paperback/482 pages/$29.68/Amazon SG (amzn.to/4aiYDVe)
5 out of 5

A dead body, disembowelled on a rooftop. Two detectives, studying the scene of the crime in the cold hours before dawn. Across the water, a possible witness: a beautiful, enigmatic femme fatale who may be their downfall.

So far, so noir. But this murder has occurred in a city that does not exist, in the Roaring Twenties of an America that never was. In Cahokia, Native Americans call the shots.

Many have tried to reprise the style of American hard-boiled detective fiction immortalised by writers Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Some have succeeded over the years. One thinks of James Ellroy’s seamy L.A. Confidential (1990); Richard K. Morgan’s cyberpunk thriller Altered Carbon (2002); or China Mieville’s speculative urban mystery The City & The City (2009).

In the past decade, however, no one has come close to touching the legacy of Hammett and Chandler – till now.

British author Francis Spufford made his novelistic debut with the 18th-century picaresque Golden Hill (2016) and was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize for the World War II “what if” Light Perpetual.

Cahokia Jazz is his third novel and his grandest intervention in history yet. Its timeline diverges from real-world history in that the variety of smallpox introduced to the indigenous populations of North American by European settlers was a less deadly one.

This significantly alters the political geography of the continent. Indigenous royalty still holds sway in 1922 Cahokia, a powerful industrial city across from today’s St Louis, Missouri. Its language, Anopa, is based on Mobilian Trade Jargon, a real-world lingua franca used by Native American peoples up and down the Mississippi.

Readers are introduced to Cahokia through the outsider perspective of homicide detective Joe Barrow, a World War I veteran who is new to the city.

Though he has Native ancestry, he was raised an orphan and does not speak Anopa, unlike his white partner Phineas Drummond, who grew up in the region and persuaded Barrow to join him in Cahokia.

When a white man’s corpse is found styled as a ritual sacrifice atop a government building, a provocative word in Anopa smeared in blood on his forehead, the city boils on the verge of a race war.

Its de facto leader, the Man of the Sun, personally tasks Barrow to solve the murder. This tests Barrow’s friendship with the amoral Drummond, whose eagerness to pin the crime on the nearest available suspect belies how war trauma has left his nerves hanging by a thread.

Barrow sets about untangling the city’s complex web of players, including Native anarchists, smarmy capitalists and an insidious incursion of the Ku Klux Klan – racism remains an unfortunate feature of this alternate universe.

He investigates – and falls for – the lovely Couma Hashi, the aloof, insomniac princess who serves as the Moon to her uncle’s Sun.

The different races in the city are referred to not in English but Anopa terms. Indigenous people are “takouma”. Black people are “taklousa” and white people “takata”.

This is likely to rile the sort of reader who resents subtitles or footnotes. This linguistic decentring, however, deeply enriches the novel’s world-building, every aspect of which is constructed in astounding detail, from architecture to religion.

Especially stunning are Spufford’s descriptions of the urban jungle. Barrow, engaging in some early morning flanerie, observes: “A passing streetcar crackled blue. The light put a dusty bloom on the stones like the skin of a plum.”

Threaded with alleys and thick with an animate fog, Cahokia recalls the “unreal city” of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. (Eliot gets a mention as “a takata fellow from the city called Tom”, whom Couma’s foundation is sponsoring to write “something earthshaking”, into which he is incorporating Anopa.)

Despite its complexity, the novel – which takes place over just six days – is made propulsive by an intricate mystery and gripping action sequences, including fistfights, gun battles and a heart-in-throat riot scene.

The narrative is imbued with an arch sense of rhythm. Barrow also happens to be a talented pianist and often contemplates leaving police work behind to play jazz full-time.

His search for the truth becomes a tuning of the city. As the Man of the Sun suggests, “the reason you keep being in time is that you are in time, this week, in the musical sense. The city is playing a song and you have a part in it”.

The book is subtly dedicated to a titan of speculative fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, whose father, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, makes a cameo in the story as a friend of Couma’s.

Le Guin redefined science fiction with her ambiguous utopias. Cahokia Jazz has similar ambitions, albeit shrouded in the pulpy guise of a crackling hard-boiled yarn.

It asks the reader to imagine another city, perhaps a better city – but one that, like every so-called utopia, carries at its heart a secret cost.

If you like this, read: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins, 2007, $20.64, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3J31ghE), another alternate-history murder mystery in which Jewish refugees from World War II were temporarily resettled in Alaska. In the Yiddish-speaking city of Sitka, police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a chess prodigy found dead in the dingy hotel he himself is staying in.