Paradise Aside: A Jazz Noir Mystery is a noir murder mystery that takes place in a large US city in 1929. I told readers of my newsletter last month I was writing something for a 1920s historical fiction writing contest. But as I plotted it out, the story I wanted to tell quickly grew beyond the very limited length for the contest. So instead of a short story, I’m offering a novella about eight times as long. Here’s a bit about the story and my research.
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Paradise Aside
You might be more familiar with the historical fiction I write and promote set in the American West of the late nineteenth century. But I also enjoy the detective stories that became popular in the 1930s, stories like The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man series by Dashiell Hammett.
Paradise Aside: A Jazz Noir Mystery tells such a story with a bit of a twist. The story begins with a private detective, Sam, discovering the murdered body of a young man, Amory. (The detective’s name will change, but I’ll use Sam here as a placeholder until I decide). Chapters then alternate between Amory’s final weeks leading up to his murder and Sam’s investigation.
Amory’s perspective is that of a rich kid whose family has seen better times. Sam’s is that of the hard-boiled, seen-it-all private detective. The two stories and perspectives collide when Sam confronts Amory’s murderer.
Why “Paradise Aside?” Why “Jazz Noir?”
Before I drag you into this dark alley, I want to reassure you that Paradise Aside: A Jazz Noir Mystery is, first and foremost, what’s on the label, a noir mystery. If you enjoy these types of stories, you should enjoy Paradise Aside.
Now, into that alley. As I intended Paradise Aside for entry in a writing contest, I took a literary approach to the story that I thought might interest the judges as much as it did me. Through Amory’s murder and Sam’s investigation, the murder mystery tells the larger story of the end to the post-WWI optimism of 1920 through the “jazz age” of the 20s, and ending with the stark reality of the 30s’ “noir” era.
To that end, I used not-so-cleverly disguised references to literary works of the era that represent the sentiments of those decades. Amory’s burgeoning jazz era perspective and the characters in his circle are loosely based on the characters of This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald described the flamboyance and excess of the jazz age as a generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.” Sam’s perspective and the characters who represent the noir era are loosely based on the characters of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.
I say “loosely based” because I have not taken those exact characters and placed them in a new story. Rather, I have given the characters in Paradise Aside the same or similar names as the characters in the original works who represent the same character type. The Maltese Falcon is not in the (US) public domain yet (not until 2025), so I couldn’t use those exact character names or characters.
You don’t need any knowledge of the referenced works to enjoy this story. But… If you are intimately familiar with the source works, you might think something like “Amory didn’t meet Clara there,” but hopefully, you will also think, “but I could see Clara saying that.”
Ultimately, in Paradise Aside, I tell three stories in one (or is it four): Amory’s murder and Sam’s investigation of it. The end of the 1920s Post-WWI optimism. The changes in popular literature from 1920 to 1930.
Researching Paradise Aside
To get a sense of the sentiments and language of 1920s, I read several works of the era. Since the literary story behind the genre story is about the changes from 1920 to 1930, I focused on popular literature of the time, most of which are still considered classics and required reading in American Literature classes—at least they were when I took the courses. In particular, I wanted to get the feel of the two principal authors I was researching in their first published novels.
I also rewatched, for the umpteenth time, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and The Thin Man (1934) to soak in the era. I also discovered and enjoyed watching “Gang War” (1940) a “Black noir” film with an almost all-Black cast. The film is not very well restored (and skips a few minutes), so I can’t recommend it unless you are really interested in this very niche genre.
Here are the works I researched with blurbs from their Amazon sales pages. They are in publication order. Note: These works are all in the public domain, so many versions and publications are available for them, including many that are free. I have included Project Gutenberg links for works available free there.
This Side of Paradise
This Side of Paradise (1920) was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first published novel.
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. The book examines the lives and morality of post–World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature.
The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status seeking, and takes its title from a line of Rupert Brooke’s poem, Tiare Tahiti. The novel famously helped F. Scott Fitzgerald gain Zelda Sayre’s hand in marriage; its publication was her condition of acceptance.
The Age of Innocence
The Age of Innocence (1921), the Pulitzer winning novel by Edith Wharton. Although the book takes place in the 1870s, Wharton’s 1920s perspective is somewhat like my perspective on the 1920s.
The Age of Innocence is Edith Wharton’s twelfth novel, initially serialized in four parts in the Pictorial Review magazine in 1920, and later released by D. Appleton and Company as a book in New York and in London. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making it the first novel written by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and thus Wharton was the first woman to win the prize. The story is set in upper-class New York City in the 1870s.
The Beautiful and the Damned
The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s logical step between This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby.
In this follow-up to his tremendously successful first novel, This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald again recaptures the Jazz Age’s darker side as well as its excitement and joie de vivre. The Beautiful and Damned traces the meteoric path of two glittering young socialites. Building their marriage on the shaky foundation of an expected inheritance, they devote themselves to hedonistic pursuits that lead to moral and financial bankruptcy.
The characters’ self-indulgence and mutual destruction anticipated the tragic lives of Scott and his flapper wife, Zelda. The Fitzgeralds regarded the world as a stage and their lives as performances, and their glamorous doings became as well-known as any of Scott’s books. In an eerie foreshadowing of the real-life couple’s rapid descent into ruin, this lyric, compulsively readable narrative examines the perishable nature of dreams in the face of reality—a theme scrutinized with profound effect in the book’s esteemed successor, The Great Gatsby.
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby (1925) was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, which has had several film adaptations.
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his quixotic passion and obsession with the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald’s magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval and excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
Red Harvest
Red Harvest (1929) was Dashiell Hammet’s first published novel.
Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest: When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.
The Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon (1930) was Dashiell Hammett’s most recognized novel, which has been adapted to film several times. Note: Hammet’s depiction of Black people was typical of the time, but is offensive today.
A coolly glittering gem of detective fiction that has haunted three generations of readers, from one of the greatest mystery writers of all time.
A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man name Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s iconic, influential, and beloved The Maltese Falcon.
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