Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Katharine Schellman

It’s 1925 in New York City, and the Jazz Age is in full swing.  Prohibition has been the law of the land for five years, but you’d never know it at the Nightingale Cafe, a speakeasy where crowds drink illegal cocktails and listen to Beatrice Bluebird sing.

Vivian Kelly works at the Cafe as a waitress, but she is on the dance floor as much as possible.  When she and Bea interrupt a fight between Spence, one of the club’s newest employees, and an unknown gangster, it proves to be the beginning of the problems that the Nightingale is facing.

Vivian and her sister Florence are orphans.  Their mother died when they were toddlers, and their father deserted his children soon after his wife’s death.  The girls grew up in an orphanage, learning the sewing skills that allowed them to earn a living, meager though it was.  Now Florence is married and the mother of an infant daughter, and perhaps because of that she has taken what may turn out to be a life-changing step.

A few months earlier Vivian and Florence had visited their mother’s grave on Hart Island and discovered that someone had placed a headstone on it.  Believing they were alone in the world, the sisters couldn’t imagine who would have done that, and through negotiations with people in the city administration Vivian manages to discover the address of the unknown benefactor, but not their name.

Nonetheless, Florence sends a letter to that address, explaining who she is and why she is writing.  Now, after months of not receiving an answer, one arrives.  The letter invites the sisters to visit the writer, Ruth Quinn, and so they do, although they can’t imagine the connection between Ruth and their late mother.

Ruth admits to paying for their mother’s headstone and explains that she is their aunt, their father’s sister.  She gives them some information about their parents’ marriage and tells them that their father died several years ago.  Although Ruth is welcoming at first, during the conversation her behavior changes, and she seems eager to to have the sisters leave.

Meantime, back at the Nightingale, trouble is definitely brewing.  Silent, the nickname given to one of the bouncers, is murdered, and a mysterious man returns for a second night.  He’s looking for a man named Hugh Brown and threatens Vivian and Honor Huxley, the Cafe’s owner, that he’ll return in two days and expects to find Brown there or else.

Katharine Schellman has written the fourth novel about Vivian Kelly, but sadly she has announced it will be the last in the series.  I’m really sorry that there won’t be more adventures with Vivian as the protagonist and the fascinating cast of characters around her:  Honor Huxley, owner of the Nightingale; Florence, Vivian’s older sister; Danny, Florence’s husband; Leo Green, low-level gangster and Vivian’s friend.  But I plan to keep my eyes peeled for what I hope will be a new series by the author.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novel.

The Roaring Twenties–jazz, Prohibition, gangsters, speakeasies–it’s all there in Katharine Schellman’s second novel in the Nightingale series, The Last Drop of Hemlock.

Vivian Kelly is working as a waitress/dance partner at the Nightingale, a New York City nightclub featuring hot jazz, cold (alcoholic) drinks, and young people looking for a fun evening.  Her best friend at the club is Bea Henry, the sultry singer who makes the club the hot spot that it is.  Bea enters late one night, an hour and a half after she was due to begin singing with the band, and tells Vivian in a whisper that her Uncle Pearlie, recently employed as a bouncer at the club, is dead.

Pearlie had moved to Manhattan from Baltimore a short time earlier, and Bea’s entire family immediately bonded with him.  He had stayed with the Henrys for a while, then moved into his own apartment, telling them that he would soon be coming into money and would use it to make their lives easier.  Thus his death has come as a huge shock.

The neighborhood’s local physician, Dr. Harris, has called Pearlie’s death a suicide, but Bea doesn’t believe that, and neither does Vivian.  Bea says the doctor’s visit after the death was superficial, merely saying that sometimes a man gets so despondent about his life and prospects that he simply can’t deal with it any longer and kills himself, as Pearlie apparently did by putting arsenic in his bottle of liquor.  However, Bea tells Vivian that her uncle felt he was on the way up, and that appears to be true when they visit his apartment, along with Vivian’s friend Leo Green.

It’s small but cozy, Vivian thinks, and she wonders how he was able to afford the well-made suit hanging on a wall hook as well as the silk handkerchiefs she finds in the small nightstand next to his bed.  Bea admits that Pearlie had told her he was working for a mob boss, that he had just “one more job to finish…He wasn’t despairing…He was downright jaunty.”

With Leo, who has his own connection to a New York City mob, Vivian begins her investigation into Pearlie’s death.  Vivian and Leo visit the morgue, and the medical examiner tells them that the death is suspicious, although looking into it more closely isn’t something he can do.  Leo had taken the liquor they found in Pearlie’s apartment and brought it to the medical examiner, and the doctor says that it was full of arsenic.  “If someone drank it, I can’t imagine they lived through the night,” the examiner says.

The Last Drop of Hemlock features an outstanding plot as well as a fascinating cast of characters.  In addition to Vivian, Bea, and Leo, readers will meet Alba, another waitress at the Nightingale and Pearlie’s girlfriend; Honor Huxley, the club’s owner with her own ties to the underworld; Florence, Vivian’s much less worldly sister; and Danny Chin, the bartender who just might urge Florence out of her shell.  The novel is a wonderful look into The Jazz Age in 1920’s Manhattan.

Katherine Schellman is a former actor, one-time political consultant, and current writer.  You can read more about her at this website.