“There were so many things in the world she could not solve, but hopefully, she could solve this.”
This blog has not been my priority in the last few years, for a mix of obvious and less obvious reasons, but I have continued to read widely. Some really cracking crime fiction titles and studies have been published or reprinted this year. Hopefully, at some point in the near future, you’ll get my reviews of 2021 titles like Lori Rader-Day’s Death at Greenway, the reissue of F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to See the Peepshow, and John Goddard’s second volume of Agatha Christie’s Golden Age. Now, though, I wanted to share with you one of my favourite books of 2021.
Dead Dead Girls (2021) is a remarkable debut and the first in a series by Nekesa Afia. It is remarkable in its own right, but all the more astonishing when you consider that Afia is 24 and wrote this while studying as an undergraduate. Set in 1920s Harlem, it features Louise Lloyd, a much-needed black queer detective, who will return next year in Harlem Sunset.
Louise, who works as a waitress and spends her nights at a speakeasy, is scarred by an incident that took place in her teens. Now, in 1926, black women like her are being abducted and killed, and the world at large seems to be turning a blind eye. When she is apprehended after a drunken brawl, a police detective convinces her to work with him to find the serial killer. Like all the best amateur detectives, her value to the force lies in her access to spaces the white male officers could not hope to penetrate.
From Louise’s tender secret relationship with her girlfriend, Rosa, to squalid boarding house that dancing girls have made a community, and the systematic corruption underscoring every turn of these women’s lives, Afia writes engagingly, eloquently, and evocatively. You really feel like you are experiencing Harlem in 1926. And, with a horrible jolt, you realise how many of the same conversations around race, sex, and class are still extremely relevant today.
Before I bought Dead Dead Girls, I read a review online, which I can’t find now, that complained it was nothing special, nothing new. Just a conventional mystery with a new character in the lead. I wonder if that reviewer missed the point somewhat.
Hundreds of conventional mysteries are published every year, maybe set in the interwar years and almost always featuring white straight male detectives, with no more than one difference (someone in television once told me, horrifyingly, ‘one difference is edgy, two or more are impossible’ – they were talking about newcomers on television can be people of colour or queer or disabled or over 50 but not any combination, with very few exceptions). Some of these mysteries have strong themes, messages, and senses of place. But think about any ground-breaking, significant, and enduring detective. They all start out comfortably in their series; their presence alone is significant.
Sherlock Holmes broke ground as a ‘consulting detective’ given prominence in a crime adventure along already established lines. Miss Marple broke ground as an elderly spinster solving a typically Golden Age complex mystery in her own community. Philip Marlowe broke ground working outside the law and in his own head in a story that had been done a hundred times in print and on screen. Louise Lloyd is a black queer woman of her space and of her time, but no one like her has yet achieved prominence as an investigator in the crime fiction genre. Even without the accessibility and urgency of Afia’s prose, Lloyd’s presence alone is ground-breaking.
In sum, Dead Dead Girls is an auspicious start to a series and a career. It is an immersive read and a mystery that is both entertaining and necessary.
