It’s not often that a dead man opens the story that will
be narrated by him as a young man. Common in memoir but less so in crime fiction, it’s redolent
of the golden age of detective fiction, although set in 1920 New York City rather than an isolated English manor house.
Our protagonist is Morris Markey, a striving reporter in a city famed for novelists, essayists, poets. All the famous
people of the era get a mention in the opening chapter, none more
than F. Scott Fitzgerald, larger and brighter than life, his meteoric
rise just begun.
Following a disgruntling evening party where Fitzgerald is lauded and our
protagonist is ignored, Markey spies the titular woman in
the green dress going into a townhouse opposite his cramped basement flat with bon vivant womanizer Joseph Elwell. Come dawn, Elwell is dead inside his locked house and the girl is gone as if she never existed.
As the hunt for the woman in the green dress heats up, Mark spends
more time with Zelda Fitzgerald, than her own husband does. This
mercurial historical percentage is captured with delicate, nuanced admiration, not unmixed with cynicism. Scott and Zelda are a phenomenon,
deliberately cultivating their image and fascinated by what is said and
reported about themselves. Yet Zelda‘s keen observations help our
reporter peer into the mysterious, to him, ways of women in that era, liberated on the surface although few control their own money and most are at the mercy of
husbands who bought them for their pedigree or their looks. Markey makes his reputation as a reporter on the solution but he knows the story his paper printed isn't the whole truth. So he keeps digging.
One thing that jumped out at me, possibly because I’m a writer and
possibly because I have long studied New York writer culture of the
early 20th century, was the brief observation that Fitzgerald was using
his wife’s words in his work. How much of the work is Zelda's rather than Scott's is dwelt upon,
not being what this book is about. But what I’m taking away is the
implication that Fitzgerald decided Zelda didn’t have the emotional stability to turn the output of her erratic, brilliant mind
into books, and therefore her words were fair game for him. Whether
that’s his selfish justification for essentially mining that disturbed
woman’s sparkling veneer for his best-selling books is still an
open question to me. But it is at the core of that marriage, whether as
cement or as an unbridgeable schism.
And thus the Scott-Zelda relationship acts as both theme and spotlight against which the other marriages in the book, the excesses and spectacular flame-outs of the wild post-WW1 era itself, are set. Zelda's emotional fragility and Scott's alternating care for her with going off the rails himself reflect the instability and psychological damage that many veterans of the trenches, now trying to establish their post-war lives, carry with them.
Markey was of course a real newspaper, man, who did die at his home desk approximately as described in the opening chapter. While many of the characters
are drawn from life of the era, and Elwell did in fact die under
mysterious circumstances, all the rest of this Markey's fictional investigation is careful accretion,
substitution, and juxtaposition of people and events that were in fact
scattered over New York City and the surrounding states over several months.
All in all, this is a fascinating murder mystery, wrapped up in
the wild mess of NYC’s showbiz and gambling and politics as covered by
reporters who were often little better than modern paparazzi, chasing
celebrities around the city and the clock for scandals to feed their fluctuating
paychecks.
Competently written, elegantly character-sketched, this is a novel
to pair with a glass of bubbly and a plate of canapés while big
band razamatazz plays in the background.
Thanks, Netgalley and Macmillan, for the review copy.
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| By Studio photographer - F. Scott Fitzgerald Archives, Public Domain, | https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93375600 |
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| By Zelda Fitzgerald - Google Images, Public Domain, | https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75476145 |
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