New Orleans Mourning
by Julie Smith
Summary
Mardi Gras, and the King of Carnival is on his float in white tie and rhinestone crown when someone dressed as Dolly Parton shoots him from a balcony over the parade route. The victim is Chauncey St. Amant, Rex himself, philanthropist, power broker, the city's official embodiment of civic virtue, and the assassination in costume, in public, in front of the cameras, hands the NOPD a case wrapped in the city's own pageantry.
Skip Langdon gets a corner of it for the worst and best of reasons: she is a rookie patrolwoman, six feet tall and chronically unsure of it, but she is also lapsed Uptown gentry, a debutante who fled the world the St. Amants rule, and the brass want her pedigree working the family. Smith runs the investigation as a tour of two New Orleans wired into one: the krewes and garden district drawing rooms where reputation is the only currency, and the Quarter's demimonde where the St. Amant children have gone to ground, an aimless daughter and a mistreated son, each carrying a piece of the household's real history, which the murdered king's public sainthood was engineered to bury. The solution turns on what the family let happen indoors for decades, and the last movement asks Skip to choose between the truth and the city's need for its myths, a New Orleans question if there ever was one.
Around three hundred and forty pages, thick with carnival detail.
Best for readers who want the police procedural as social anthropology, the Mardi Gras machinery opened up by a writer who knows which masks are load bearing.
Historical Context & Significance
New Orleans Mourning won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1991, and the statistic travelled with the news: Julie Smith was the first American woman to take the award since Margaret Millar in 1956, a three decade gap that had become the era's standing indictment, and her win arrived precisely as the women's crime wave, Grafton, Paretsky, Muller, was remaking the market the awards had lagged.
Smith, a former Times-Picayune and San Francisco Chronicle reporter, had served a long paperback apprenticeship before Skip Langdon broke through; the series ran ten further books, its detective's size, class defection and slow earned confidence making her a quietly influential figure in the tall awkward heroine lineage the genre now takes for granted.
The novel's Uptown anatomy drew local argument and national praise in the usual proportions, and it stands now in the pre Katrina New Orleans shelf beside Burke's Cajun country, the city's carnival self examined by one of its lapsed communicants.