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    Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery
    Unavailable
    Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery
    Unavailable
    Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery
    Ebook311 pages4 hours

    Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery

    By Ed Ifkovic

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Manhattan, 1927: Edna Ferber prepares for “the Ferber season on Broadway.” On December 27, the musical adaptation of Show Boat by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern opens. On December 28, The Royal Family, her comedy of manners written with George Kaufman, hits the stage despite Ethel Barrymore’s disapproval of the play’s depiction of “theatrical royalty.” But despite the excitement, Edna misses both opening nights. She has something else on her mind—murder.
    Recently, Edna has been absorbed by the heady milieu of the Roaring Twenties’ Harlem Renaissance—the jazz clubs, the faddish dances, the frenzy—and the lively pulse of Broadway that entices talented young “Negroes” to push for mainstream recognition of black voices and talents.
    Edna has also been mentoring some of these young writers and actors, including her housekeeeper’s son, Waters Turpin. And then there’s the boyishly handsome Roddy Parsons, a charismatic man most recently in the “Negro chorus” of Show Boat. But when Edna heads to Harlem to take Parsons to lunch, she discovers he’s been stabbed to death in his bed.
    Who murdered Roddy? There are the writers who meet at Edna’s apartment, among them Bella Davenport, a beautiful vamp; Ellie Payne, a jazz singer; Freddy Holder, a rabble-rouser; and Lawson Hicks, Bella’s handsome boyfriend. There is also Jed Harris, the young producer of The Royal Family, a darling of the Broadway set, but a notoriously cruel man. Aided by Waters Turpin and his mother, as well as by poet Langston Hughes, Edna eschews theatrics to track down a dangerous and real killer.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPoisoned Pen Press
    Release dateAug 1, 2013
    ISBN9781615954667
    Unavailable
    Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery
    Author

    Ed Ifkovic

    Ed Ifkovic taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades. His short stories and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, America, Hartford Monthly, and Journal of Popular Culture. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls discovering Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world.

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