A DEATH IN HARLEM

A beautiful young woman’s fatal fall (or was it a push?) through a hotel’s window provokes multiple investigations into all manner of secrets in New York’s African American community at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.

Called to the podium of the Ninth Annual Opportunity Awards Banquet to receive the prize for Creative Fiction for her short story “Sanctuary,” Olivia Frelon misses her cue because she’s lying in the street outside the Hotel Theresa, her body shattered by the fall. At first the officers of the 30th Precinct have little interest in her death. When they do act, it’s to arrest Vera Scott, Olivia’s dear friend, frequent hostess, and wife to Dr. Reynolds Scott, Olivia’s lover. Sadie Mathis, Vera’s maid, convinced that her employer could never have killed even such a treacherous friend, asks Officer Weldon Haynie Thomas to look into the case on his own. As he patiently explains to her, Weldon has no official standing to investigate; he’s not even a detective. But as “Harlem’s first colored policeman,” he surely has some standing in the community. Agreeing to do what he can, Weldon doesn’t know that wealthy, white entrepreneur Hughes Wellington, a frequent patron of the African American community, has already engaged private investigator Sanders Campbell to make inquiries of his own. The secrets that emerge, it turns out, are all about race: racial pride, racial identity, racial passing, and the problematic relations between a Harlem community yearning for self-expression and the white institutions determined to police it while keeping it at a safe distance. Slipping in and out of Weldon’s voice, retired Duke professor Holloway (Legal Fictions, 2014, etc.) handsomely demonstrates his self-effacing professional maxim: “If you wait, information will come get you.”

Holloway brings her period, place, and people alive and provides as a bonus a most unexpected culprit.