Francis Spufford’s fabulous third novel is a piece of pulp fiction disguised as speculative history, or possibly vice versa: the tale plays both sides and switches lanes in a blur. It is set in an alternative 1920s America that is recognisable at the edges and unfamiliar at its core, centred on a First Nations people who have avoided the worst effects of manifest destiny to maintain a toehold of power in the febrile midwest. Where Golden Hill, Spufford’s riotous 2016 bestseller, took its lead from the writings of Henry and Sarah Fielding to paint a portrait of nascent 18th-century New York, Cahokia Jazz nods to the hard-boiled prose of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It rattles through the urban jungle in the manner of a fast-paced dimestore thriller.
Every good detective story is at heart a licence to roam – an excuse to kick open doors and interview all the suspects. So it is with Cahokia Jazz, which is at least as interested in the investigation of its constructed metropolis as it is in solving the murder of lowly, luckless Fred Hopper, who is found dead on a roof with his heart torn from his chest. The evidence suggests a ritual killing. Suspicion immediately falls on the Indigenous community. But Hopper, in addition to his day job as a clerk, was embroiled with the Ku Klux Klan and in debt to a bootlegger, and his death quickly points to a wider political conspiracy. Spufford’s invented city – built around the true-life Cahokia Mounds, near a village called St Louis – is a place of blind alleys and dark corners. It’s thick with mystery and in thrall to arcane tribal lore. The majority First Nations population holds sway but its position is tenuous: this utopia is revealed to be a tottering house of cards.
