Noir in a Lost World

Francis Spufford’s murder mystery ‘Cahokia Jazz’ offers visions of an alternate universe where North America’s original inhabitants were protected from devastation by European disease.

Cahokia Jazz
by Francis Spufford
Scribner, 464 pp., $28

CAHOKIA IS THE NAME given to a large medieval Native American city that existed from about 1050 to 1350 in western Illinois just across the Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis. (Excavations there are still ongoing; we will be exploring its mysteries for many years to come.) But in Francis Spufford’s new novel, Cahokia Jazz, Cahokia is the capital of the State of Cahokia, an erstwhile Native American kingdom that willingly joined itself to the United States after helping the Union win the Civil War. By 1922, when the novel is set, Cahokia is a major metropolis where Native American and African American citizens enjoy full civil rights and freedom from segregation.

Cahokia is also the site of a terrible murder. A white man is slain in spectacular, ritualistic fashion atop a tower in central Cahokia; his heart has been removed, and a political slogan is painted on his forehead in his own blood. Is this the work of Native American separatists, or is it perhaps too conveniently staged for that to be true? Detective Joe Barrow is on the case but, before he has even left the crime scene, he is approached by the Man of the Sun, the scion of what used to be Cahokia’s royal family. The Man charges Barrow with solving the crime truthfully, resisting whatever political or social pressures might be brought to bear on him to force a tidy explanation, and he says he will do what he can to ensure the citizens of Cahokia will cooperate with the investigation.

This premise locates us firmly in classic noir territory, and like any good noir, Cahokia Jazz has a memorable detective moving the case along. Barrow is exemplary. When we meet him, he is a man who has been content to provide the brawn to complement the brains of his partner, Phineas Drummond. That doesn’t mean he’s a slow-fingered meathead, though: Barrow is also an accomplished jazz pianist. (“Muscle work was a stupid thing for a pianist to get involved in. But to stop it he’d have to decide that he actually was a pianist, not just muscle who played a little sometimes.”)

Though Barrow is part Native American and part African American, he grew up in an orphanage far from Cahokia, which leaves him unfamiliar with the great city’s culture: He doesn’t speak the language and is frequently (perhaps too frequently) confused by Cahokia’s idiosyncrasies. As circumstances and the personal attention of Cahokia’s lapsed royalty pull him into the spotlight for an unexpected solo performance, Barrow comes into his own as a detective, and the metropolis begins to give up its secrets to him.

It is a good mystery: The twists are exciting, the characters memorable. But the mystery itself is not the core of the novel, as it would be for a technician of intrigue like Agatha Christie. Spufford instead uses the plot as a method of exploration: What he’s really interested in showing us is a North American milieu denied to us by the apocalyptic virulence of smallpox.

The branching-off point of the novel’s alternate history is the transatlantic spread of the disease to the Americas by way of European ships. In our world, smallpox killed a number of people that cannot be meaningfully imagined, contributing to the death of up to 95 percent of the Native American population in the sixteenth century. In the adjacent multiversal plane of Cahokia Jazz, a less fatal strain struck the continent first, and survivors of this lower-grade disease received immunity to its more dreaded cousin. When Europeans started moving west through North America, they encountered the undiminished, thriving civilizations “that Hernando de Soto observed on the banks of the Mississippi in the 1530s: the large towns, the dense populations of maize farmers.”

These robust Native American societies served as a brake on the westward expansion of the United States, and the further west one goes from Cahokia, the less familiar the map of this reality looks to a denizen of ours. These branching paths provide their own entertainments: In the world of the novel, the U.S.A. never bought Alaska; the Mormon Republic of Deseret is a separate nation that takes up much of the West; and several U.S. states have either different names or different borders. (I personally delighted in the book’s account of the alternate Battle of Vicksburg.)

Spufford is playing to his strengths in building this world: His past work has frequently dealt with complicated historical or technical subjects, and he has always conferred to them legibility and even a kind of poetry. Red Plenty (2010), his quasi-novel about the Soviet planned economy, beautifully explicates the mechanics of 1960s computers, the concept of “shadow prices,” and the pathology of lung cancer. His novel Golden Hill (2016) is a feat of multilevel construction: Its rollicking, mysterious story is built on a timber frame, the wood being the sociopolitical and logistical realities of 1740s New York. Readers approaching any Spufford book should expect to Learn Things, but his lucid and beautiful prose means it’s never a chore.

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CAHOKIA JAZZ BELONGS TO what has become a well-established subgenre of alt-history noir mysteries. The most well-known is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), whose detectives try to solve a murder in an imagined city founded in Alaska by Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler. But the book I thought of the most while reading Cahokia Jazz was The City & the City (2009), a novel by China Miéville whose plot unfolds in two overlapping cities that occupy the same physical location even though they are entirely separate political entities. (Miéville appears in Spufford’s acknowledgments.) Both novels provide views of strange cities with unique histories and unusual political and/or economic structures, and both explore these environments by putting the reader in the company of police investigators running down a case.

Noir and police procedurals are natural means for exploratory projects: In addition to noir’s stock of sumptuous, atmosphere-generating tropes, a typical noir premise authorizes the main character to go everywhere a reader would want to see. In his official police role, Barrow is invested with both the authority of the police and the authority of the local aristocracy. He can force or wheedle his way into every neighborhood and into the homes of the powerful and powerless alike.

Spufford puts him on the case; Barrow’s journey into the Cahokian night sets a pitch-perfect mood while also giving a sense for Spufford’s prose style, which is here simultaneously restrained and accomplished:

Barrow could hardly see the buildings next to him as he walked up Division, let alone the ones on the far side of the street. The world was a few square feet of paving slabs beyond which everything dissolved. Around every streetlamp, a halo of light fog floated within dark fog, grainy, restless; as if, if you could look at it through a microscope, you’d see corpuscles thronging. All sounds were muffled. A single streetcar went by, its hum hushed, fuzzed spokes of yellow light from the windows turning as it passed, like something seen underwater.

Barrow reads the signs, follows the clues. He has a reason to enter a garret in Germantown. (He finds it haunted by the “distinctive smell that declares that these were the doors to cold-water apartments, where human washing could only be accomplished by the painstaking boiling of kettles, and therefore was often left unfinished.”) He has a reason to ring the doorbell of a blue-blood mansion, to stop by the Union Club, to survey a meatpacking plant Upton Sinclair would have found grimly familiar; he has very good reasons to attend jazz shows at speakeasies designed to evoke longhouses.

The population is as carefully and amusingly described as their surroundings. He meets poet-reporters like the “quick-footed little man in a striped suit and spats, with a face like an intelligent cat,” corrupt detectives with “funny-pages blue eyes,” wealthy businessmen, femmes fatales from high society—“here was a face made of angled bones, temporarily stretched-over with skin”—labor organizers, mob bosses, anthropologists, beat cops, and the mayor. “The kind of press he liked featured headlines such as THE GREAT REALIGNMENT, with pictures of himself looking thoughtfully out of high windows,” Spufford writes about this latter fellow.

The culture of the city is a fascinating syncretic mishmash of Catholicism, Mississippiana, jazz, and Aztec influences. An enormous Mesoamerican ballgame court sits opposite Cahokia’s vast Catholic cathedral, the two places connected by a grand plaza. The central train station—headquarters of the Cahokia Pacific Railroad, the nation’s most important transcontinental commercial artery—was imagined by the same people who designed New York’s old Penn Station. In Cahokia, they were paid enough to plan something “competitively fabulous,” including a “stained-glass sun” of a dome. Providing a synecdoche for the grand mixing of cultures that happens in this city, the station is overlooked by a statue of the Virgin of Cahokia; the monumental figure has “the infant Christ in her arms, and a sickle moon on her head.”

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BUT HOWEVER MUCH FUN IT IS to take in these views, doing so is also not the purpose of the novel. Cahokia Jazz is not just a collection of postcards from Cahokia: It is also a story about what the existence of a place like Cahokia would mean for the larger world.

Borrowing from the great Ursula K. Le Guin, the book’s dedicatee, we might call Spufford’s imagined metropolis an “ambiguous utopia.” Certainly, not every wrong is repaired in this timeline: slavery and the Civil War still occurred; The Birth of a Nation was still screened for audiences of rapturous Klansmen. Prohibition is in effect in alt-1922, and organized crime satiates the demand for liquor, bribing officers and murdering competitors, just as happened in our world. But we can call this imagined city a utopia because it is built on a past with one foundational wrong corrected. And this correction sets up a different trajectory for the future.

Different, of course, does not necessarily mean better. Hence the ambiguity.

The persistence of Cahokia in the alternate timeline did not magically elicit a less murderous attitude towards Native American societies on the part of the U.S. government. The city’s military strength (both homegrown and imported from Catholic Europe) and economic power instead forced the United States into a more equal relationship with at least some of those societies. The book’s premise doesn’t deny the primacy of force in this world; it just recalibrates the balance of forces.

Some of the long-term consequences of this adjustment are new horrors unique to the world of the book, such as the small but bleak war being fought against Russia in what we know as Alaska. But it’s hard to avoid feeling that the world we glimpse in Cahokia Jazz is indeed ultimately, in some important way, not just different from, but better than ours because of its key difference from our world—even as Spufford keeps it grounded in a violence we know from our real past and present.

Spufford’s last novel, Light Perpetual (2021), also opened up an alternate history. It begins with several children killed in the Blitz, then spends the rest of its pages detailing the lives those children would have lived had they survived the bomb. What that book shares with Cahokia Jazz is a steadfast yet realistic appreciation for the value of human life. Not one of the five kids whose life is described in Light Perpetual lives a perfect and happy life: They spend time in prison, they get divorced, they struggle with schizophrenia; they do kind things and selfish things. But you always feel that the world is a better place for their existence—that despite their travails, harms, and mistakes, the bomb that killed them before they even had a chance to commit their wrongs was the greatest crime of all.

Cahokia has its own problems with corruption and crime, but the city’s existence is far too great a good to be compromised by wrongs incidental to it. It is a haven for African Americans, Native Americans, and Irish Americans at a time when few such havens existed in our world. Cahokia means that Reconstruction was not abandoned in Mississippi; the black people of its era migrated south and west to Vicksburg rather than north to Chicago and New York. Detective Joe Barrow might spend his days down in the muck of violence and corruption, but at night he rises to play jazz with people from all over the country. There is the jazz that is familiar to us and jazz drawn from Native American sources and jazz vamping on old Appalachian folk tunes. His music is not “an anesthetic for the week that flowed up his fingers from the ivories. It was an order for it, a place to put its sorrows and horrors and joys.”

And while the Trail of Tears did still happen here—one more grounding horror carried over from our world—there is an important difference: Those who walked it were met at its end by the great city of Cahokia, where they were welcomed home.