Boysie Singh was a Trinidadian bogeyman. “Behave yourself,” mothers would warn their naughty children, “or Boysie goyn get allyuh.” A notorious gangster, he terrorised Trinidadian society for decades until his death by execution in 1957. Ingrid Persaud’s new novel, The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh, follows in the wake of her debut, Love After Love, which won the Costa first novel award in 2020. This time she fictionalises a true story, capturing the particularities of the period and the place, while imagining Singh through the voices of four women, each differently affected by his actions. In doing so, the novel manages to acknowledge Singh’s remarkable personal magnetism while also committing to the women’s point of view. The novel doesn’t heroicise his villainy, but it does struggle to overcome a problem: namely, that Singh, as Persaud’s characters know, is a troublingly alluring figure.
