Downtown Strut

June 24, 2013
The creative world of late 1927 Manhattan provides the backdrop for Ifkovic’s unconvincing fourth mystery to feature author Edna Ferber (after 2012’s Make Believe). Amid rehearsals for the musical version of her novel Show Boat and her coauthored play The Royal Family about the Barrymores, Ferber meets friends of Waters, the bright 17-year-old son of her black housekeeper. These talented young men and women have ambitions in the literary and performing arts, but their opportunities are limited in the white-dominated world of show business. After Ferber discovers the body of Roddy Parsons, an aspiring African American writer, in his Harlem apartment, she learns that Jed Harris, the venomous producer of The Royal Family, is lying about his connections to Waters’s associates and that they all had reason to resent both him and Roddy. The inconsistent portrayal of the relationship between Ferber and Harris, repetition, and grammatical problems contribute to the implausible atmosphere.

July 15, 2013
A Jazz Age murder crosses color lines, drawing a noted patron of the arts to investigate the death of a promising black writer. Novelist/playwright Edna Ferber is exhausted from preparing her plays to be presented in what her producer, Jed Harris, has called Broadway's "Ferber Season." But her normally quiet Manhattan apartment offers less refuge than usual when she returns home to find it inhabited by a spirited group of blacks. Edna remembers that she'd offered to let Waters Turpin, her housekeeper's son, and his friends hold readings in a sort of Jazz Age salon. Edna can't help but be attracted by all the creative vibrations in her home, and she goes so far as to befriend the struggling and terminally private Roddy Parsons, joining him to see Ellie Payne, wallflower-turned-jazz ingenue. When Edna runs into her old acquaintance Langston Hughes while she's out on the town, she plans to make Waters and his crew known to the poet, but before she can set the wheels into motion, she discovers Roddy stabbed to death in his own bedroom. While the police, never overly concerned about the black community, seem convinced that this is a routine burglary gone wrong, Waters convinces Edna that something more must be afoot. When Edna discovers that Jed, who's a bit of a cad, has ties to the group of friends, she is determined to find the murderer, even if it means putting herself at risk. Edna's motives are heavy-handed but laudable in a series (Make Believe, 2012, etc.) whose latest entry focuses less on mystery than on its characters, even though most of them speak in the same voice.

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July 1, 2013
Ifkovic, who seems to enjoy jumping back and forth in time, sets the fourth Edna Ferber mystery in 1927 (the first and third were set in the 1950s, the second in 1904). Ferber, the acclaimed novelist and playwrightand, in this very entertaining series, amateur sleuthis very much enjoying the Roaring Twenties, until a friend is murdered. The suspects are many, including a handful of fellow writers and Jed Harris, a (real-life) Broadway producer. Harris isn't the only real person who makes an appearance here: Langston Hughes has a fairly substantial role, and playwright George S. Kaufman pops up, too. It's a clever idea, rebranding Ferber as an amateur sleuth; cleverer still is the author's time-hopping approach to the material: with each book, we see Ferber at a different point in her life. Ifkovic is assembling a sort of literary collage, building a picture of Ferber (this fictionalized Ferber, anyway) one piece at a time. Fans of mysteries featuring literary figures as crime-solvers will thoroughly enjoy this series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)