CHICAGO BLUES

A young musician finds interracial, gender-bending love and gangland trouble in the Windy City in this Jazz Age gay romance.

This second installment of Stookey’s Medicine for the Blues Trilogy takes piano player Jimmy Harper and his band, the Diggs Munro Jazz Orchestra, away from sedate Portland, Oregon, to Chicago, the epicenter of jazz in 1923. There, Jimmy plunges into a throbbing demimonde of illicit sex, illegal booze, and disreputable music. He visits a whorehouse and, after a liaison with a woman to prove his manhood to his band mates, observes a kinky threesome involving two male sex workers and Danny Felton, a louche but menacing bootlegger who takes a shine to him. Jimmy gravitates to Pluto’s Lair, Danny’s speak-easy, where he beholds Erica DeChez, a mesmerizing drag chanteuse who cleans up to become handsome Black jazz pianist Eric Halsey. Eric teaches Jimmy how to play jazz right; shows him Chicago’s South Side clubs and blues parties; and switches between male and female personas to introduce him to both sides of anal sex. They fall rapturously in love and dream of running off to Paris together. Alas, Chicago turns dark for them. Jimmy quits the band when Diggs refuses to play the edgy, hot jazz the pianist loves, which is too Black for well-paying White venues. Danny offers Jimmy a job playing at Pluto’s, but at a price: an assaultive sexual tryst that leaves him bleeding and woozy from a heroin injection the bootlegger forced him to take at gunpoint. Finally, Jimmy learns that Eric is involved in a plot to oust Danny from Pluto’s and take it over with the help of Irish gangsters, a scheme that threatens to end in a tommy-guns-blazing showdown.

Following up on Acquaintance (2017), Stookey presents another panorama of gay life in the ’20s, full of vivid details and lively prose. He’s proficient at piquant feminine voices, whether hard-bitten (“ ‘It’s okay,’ she laughed her peculiar hollow laugh. ‘If you can’t trust a whore, who can you trust?’ ”), vengeful (“Where is that no good, two-timin’, yellow-bellied dog?”), or catty (“Sister Erica, have you been sucking on this sweet youngster?” “Now, talk nice, Anabella, or I’ll scratch your eyes out”). Through Jimmy’s ears, the author ably conveys the thrilling, haunting sound of Chicago’s jazz efflorescence, from jaunty swing—“Everything was feeling and intuition and pulsating, rhythmic drive…a looseness that allowed growing and slackening tempos, improvisations, creative surprise and freshness”—to searing blues. (“It seemed that all hell had broken loose—a petrifying terror, a desolate loneliness…with all his rough-hewn style, with all the gravel and whiskey in his voice, Grandy’s tenor fell on Jimmy’s ear with a melodious rightness, and his facility with the guitar, slurring the notes to match the human voice, all fit together.”) There are vibrant characters here and a creepily charismatic villain in Danny, but, as in Acquaintance, the romantic protagonists are kind of dull. Jimmy is a naïf—“Why must there be this animosity between the races?”—and Eric is a paragon of sexual enlightenment. Their glossy couplings (“Soon the surging reached its climax and the rising tide of their passion washed up pearls of sea foam”) feel off-key in a cynical city.

An entertaining, sometimes lurid tale of creativity and corruption hampered by an unconvincing love story.