A few times a year I start reading a book and realize that,
besides being very entertaining and well researched, the narrative possesses a
few elements that make it feel like a very welcome and absolutely necessary
presence in contemporary crime fiction. In the case of Danny Gardner’s A Negro and an Ofay, the novel
accomplished that and more; it had me asking “Who the hell is this guy and why
don’t I have a few novels by him in my shelves already?”
Elliot Caprice is on the run after killing two crooked cops
in Chicago. He was a Chicago PD Detective, but now he finds himself on the
wrong side of the law for all the right reasons and stuck in a jailhouse in St.
Louis on false charges, using a fake name, and facing a very big man with very
bad intentions. To get out, he calls on friends from his hometown of
Southville, IL, and makes his way back to his town only to find his uncle
surviving in a flophouse and the family farm on the verge of being foreclosed.
To make money, Elliot takes a job with the son of a deadly Jewish mobster. The
gig leads him to a widow with a shady past, a chauffeur who may have more than
one secret, and a lot of money at stake. Elliot is offered serious cash to find
the man, and that takes him back to Chicago. What follows is a fast-paced
narrative that brings together 1950s Chicago, the mob, a lot of crooked
personal agendas, jazz, and enough violence and mystery to keep crime fans
satisfied for almost 300 pages.
ANegro and an Ofay is a crime novel, but one that’s
steeped in history and that possesses a wonderful sense of time and place. From
the dialogue to the fashion and from the music to the cars, Gardner paid a lot
of attention to the world he built for his narrative, and the result is a story
that reads like a great period movie in which no detail is left to chance. This
could not be accomplished without research, and the depth to which the author
went to offer accurate context for the lives and motivations of his characters is
something that deserves special attention. This book is both a crime novel
without silly clichés and a history text without the boring parts:
“Fighting in the 761st, most of his compatriots only knew of
Jews, and those were usually the big city type. They sometimes did business in
colored neighborhoods, but afterward they retired to their enclaves with their
own kind. For the average Negro, the existence of concentration camps was just
another example of how ofays do. Sure, it was another good reason to lay waste
to the Krauts, but it was abstract. Then Patton's success took colored
regiments deep within German territory, and black faces finally witnessed atrocities
that eclipsed the tortures of Jim Crow.”
Besides nailing the sense of time and place, Gardner also
manages to bring racial tension to the forefront of the story without affecting
the flow of it. Elliot is too light skinned to be black and too dark t be
white. The man is caught between two worlds, and even though it seems he
belongs to neither completely, the truth is that he’s a black man in America in
a time when being such a thing was a major problem. In this regard, the author
managed to write about race in a way that makes folks think about racial
tension while the thing that is really being discussed is racism. Furthermore,
and this is surely something that POC reviewers will probably be more
comfortable saying, Elliot is a black hero/antihero, a character that’s strong,
gets his way, and forces the reader to root for him; precisely the kind of
Other that seems to be mostly absent from most current crime fiction.
"I've been called swarthy, olive-skinned, confused for
everything from Moroccan to Sicilian to Cuban. Not by Negroes, tho'. With
colored folk, I'm obligated to be colored."
Ultimately, the beauty of A Negro and an Ofay is that it manages to be smart, historical, and
about identity/racial issues while retaining all the entertainment value that
pulpy thrillers bring to the table. This is a book with a carefully crafted
plot that touches on a lot of issues that were as relevant six decades ago as
they are now, but it’s also a hell of a fun read packed with jazz, fights, sex,
and the kind of dialogue that makes readers remember the name on the cover. I’d
say this book is enough to put Gardner on the list of authors whose work I’ll
keep an eye on, but that’d be dishonest; it’s the kind of book that makes me
want to reach out to the author and immediately start demanding more of his
work. If this is any indication of what we can expect from Double Life Press, I
strongly suggest grabbing a copy of anything they publish as soon as it comes
out.
Reviewed by Gabino Iglesias
Reviewed by Gabino Iglesias
