Gardner's story is quick and with a world already available to play within, we get to focus on his characters. Elliot Caprice is a man with a past and just trying to make it through a world that always moves the bar for a coloured man. There was never a dull moment in this book, the pace keeps moving and the plot never slouched.

Smart, with a keen eye on the times, racial and societal hierarchies, this story really surprised me. I adore the emotion and vulnerability that Gardner wrote into these Black men, how they loved and supported each other; how he gave us a community, a family, formed against the dark backdrop of racism, wealth, crime, corruption, and ethnicities.

I didn't know that I would enjoy this read as much as I did. But I am glad I picked it up.

NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

An interesting and at times triggering look into the past. Themes include colorism and self-hate. It is a great read just be careful.

This crime novel by Danny Gardner, set in the post-war middle west, features a mixed-race protagonist and therein lies the sly title. Our central character, Elliot Caprice, defies the contradictions of racial categorization, and trespasses against classes and divisions. He’s an interesting literary construction, but doesn’t make an especially sympathetic or compelling hero.

For that, it’s easy to get drawn into Gardner’s universe of 1950s yeggs and coppers, upright uncles and soft-touch flophouse owners, gold-digging dames and a saintly sawbones with mob connections. The problem is not with the atmosphere, or the hard-boiled dialogue. There’s just an overabundance of snappy talk, side-plots, secondary characters, atmospheric nightclubs, and other literary tics. (If Caprice runs his hands through his hair to denote deep concentration once, he returns to the gesture half a dozen times, and eventually it becomes annoying.)

Unmistakably, Gardner has created a kind of homage to the period noir fiction of the great pulp novelist Chester Himes, known as the “Black Raymond Chandler.” There are also elements of the earliest instalments of the wonderful Easy Rawlins novels of Walter Mosley. Well, if you’re going to borrow, why not borrow from the best?

Some sensitive readers may be put off by Gardner’s use of idiom. The n-word is bandied about, in the authentically callous manner that the phrase was commonly used during the period depicted. “Ofay” is an out-of-date epithet deployed by Blacks against whites. There are other unappealing stereotypes employed, but you get the impression the author is probably just having some fun.

The novel’s appeal is greater than its irritating elements, but Gardner needs to dial it back next time around. Without all the needlessly colliding elements, the showy descriptives, and the frequent inner-dialogue distractions, this would have been a far better book. Gardner is a good writer, and pretty adept at this genre, and I’d look forward to seeing what he comes up with next. Thanks to Bronzeville Books (which is Gardner’s self-publishing imprint), and NetGalley.com for making this worthwhile novel available for review pre-publication.