My amateur sleuth Julia Kydd would make quite a splash at any party in Manhattan wearing the shimmery frock that designers have given her to wear on the gorgeous cover of Passing Fancies, the sequel to Relative Fortunes that’s due out in June 2020. What a stunning way to capture the energy and allure of New York City in all its Jazz Age splendor.
I’m even bold enough to think it nudges Julia and her tales into the lofty company of the era’s premier work of fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, virtually embody the decade—both its fabled exuberance and its self-destructive collapse. Julia, like anyone else involved in literary and publishing circles of the 1920s, would have followed the Fitzgeralds in their over-the-top follies, but especially for Scott’s genius in capturing the doomed ethos of his generation.
The beautiful red cover of Passing Fancies signals the lush setting of a few of its key scenes: the fashionable nightclubs sprouting up in Harlem and catering to the throngs of well-heeled Manhattanites eager to enjoy endless rounds of bootleg alcohol (New York was never wetter than during Prohibition), dazzling floor shows, and addictive new jazz tunes. Those affluent crowds were mostly white—a restriction enforced by doormen at some of the most posh clubs—and the performers were almost universally Black.
What was that like? How did audiences and performers feel about the racist gulf between artist and patron? A similar dynamic played out between some of the Harlem Renaissance’s best-known Black writers and artists and the white editors and publishers who promoted (and profited from) their work.
Passing Fancies explores those tensions as Julia awakens to them. So much to think about there, both in those ’20s and now in our own.
