Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spafford Review: A gripping, ambitious crime novel.

Francis Spafford is one of England’s most inventive, unpredictable and consistently fascinating living writers. Until 2010, he made a name for himself as a non-fiction author. Red abundance – an original mixture of history and fiction about the Soviet Union – suggested that he could write novels.

Six years later, when he was 52, Spafford published his first book. golden hill, set in 18th-century New York. His second one, the one in 2021 Eternal light, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and imagined what life five south Londoners would have led if they had not been killed by a V-2 bomb during the Second World War. His third project is the longest and most ambitious.

Cahokia Jazz It’s a counterfactual thriller set in an alternate 1922, in the bustling fictional town of Cahokia on the banks of the Mississippi River. Cahokia has a large indigenous population, and “Anopa,” a version of the lingua franca once used by Native Americans along the Mississippi, is the common language.

Spafford explains in the afterword that this was because the strain of smallpox introduced by European settlers did not wipe out 90-95 percent of the native population, as is estimated to have happened in the real Americas.

The operation lasts six days and begins when two detectives, Joe Burrow and Phineas Drummond, are called to a body left on the roof of a Land Trust building in Cahokia. It turns out that this is a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Fred Hopper, on whose head a local separatist slogan is written in blood. It’s a grisly, noirish scene, vividly and pathetically described by Spafford, as Drummond crouches down to “wipe the blood and snow off his black Oxfords.”

A murder investigation takes investigators on a labyrinthine journey through a “foggy metropolis,” through bars and seedy neighborhoods. There is simmering racial tension here (Barrow is “Takuma” – a Native American, Drummond is “Takata” – a descendant of Europeans, and the city’s other major population group – “Taklusa” – is African American). Things get even worse when a large and powerful branch of the Clan plans an uprising. In this world, no one—from the press to politicians to the police themselves to even the family of a murder victim—can be automatically trusted.

It can take time to master the words of anopa and to keep track of the relationships between individuals and groups while following police procedures. Spafford knows this and tries to engage the reader with expository dialogue and scenes in which investigators record a series of events, ostensibly in the form of reports. I found this helpful, and since the novel moved at a brisk pace elsewhere, I found a welcome slowdown in the plot that didn’t feel clunky.

As a stylist, Spafford isn’t pretentious or self-assured, but his sentences are full of flair and you can enjoy their lyricism even if the story drags. As the title suggests, music plays an important role: Burrow is a talented pianist, and this seems to influence his observations even when he’s not playing. For example, as he speeds across the Mississippi in his car, we are told that he sees “the rattling steel structures of asphalt, the huge, riveted curves of bridge supports passing by at a steady four-four pace.”

Nothing in Spafford’s work, which is quite capable of pulling off a plot twist that even the most seasoned thriller reader would be unlikely to predict, goes as expected.

Cahokia Jazz suggests that he can breathe new life into any genre he chooses to work in. His preoccupation with race and identity means that, like his two previous novels, it speaks to both our present and the imagined past in which it is set.