The Red Storm is a hard-boiled mystery by first-time novelist Grant Bywaters. It is also the first time I have read a novel featuring an African American private investigator in the segregated south. Most of the action takes place in New Orleans, a city that was a bit looser than most of the South in enforcing Jim Crow, but still a segregated city with a rigid white supremacist politics and culture. This plays a role in limiting our detective, William Fletcher’s actions. For example, he usually avoids taking jobs for white clients where he might be forced to interact in white people and find himself in trouble.

It all began when a former employer and criminal enforcer, Bill Storm, sat down at his table while Fletcher was enjoying coffee and a crossword. It was not old-home week, though. The last time they saw each other, they had a knock-down, drag-out fight after Storm released a kid Storm had kidnapped and planned to kill. Storm escaped capture by the police, though not without killing a couple police officers.

Storm wanted him to find his daughter, a daughter he had not seen since infancy. Fletcher is not willing to work for a felon, after all that would be abetting, but he decides to find the daughter in order to warn her and give her the option of deciding whether to not to meet her criminal father. He finds Zella and she’s a struggling blues singer. While she’s deciding whether or not she wants to me Storm, he is murdered.

Operating the very difficult boundaries between the police and organized crime, Fletcher focuses on keeping her safe. As a hard-boiled detective novel, it rings true. It feels right and that is probably due to Bywaters professional experience as a P.I. The atmosphere of the novel is also rich in detail and feels authentic, the casual racism, the overt racism, the resigned and resentful acceptance of crowded train seats in the back and the careful, strategic methods of approaching white people, sometimes with a friendly white police officer in tow, to avoid trouble, to gain entrance, to avoid losing his license. That all feels real.

Bywaters is less successful writing about the women in the story. They did not feel nearly so authentic or complex as Fletcher, his cop friend Brawley, or the many antagonists along the way. Even Zella, who is mercurial, felt one-dimensional, as though her mercurial temperament were a note in a character description on a note card, and not an outgrowth of who she was.

I enjoyed The Red Storm. It does not quite meet the fair play rules of The Detection Club, though most of the time we learn things as Fletcher does. However, tidying up the story with ploys such as the explanation of several plots at the bedside of a wounded conspirator is not the way mysteries should end. The whole bad guy explaining stuff is supposed to be how the hero gets loose to save the day, not a coda after the day has been saved to wrap up loose ends. Fletcher is supposed to figure it out himself, he needed to find the guy by perhaps checking in with doctors or nurses or veterinarians. Secret diaries, bedside confessions, I think Fletcher deserves better than those ploys because I like Fletcher. I like his honesty, his self-awareness and acceptance, his honesty about his flaws and about his society. I want more stories about him.

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When the novel opens, it is the 20s in New York and William Fletcher is one of the best boxers fighting in the ring. But he is black - and that limits his options. He does small jobs for the criminals of the city, mainly working for Bill Storm, a thug that think nothing of abducting a child. After that accident, Storm is on the run and we cut to New Orleans in the late thirties, before the WWII start. In a city that is usually more accepting than others, Fletcher is a private investigator - and the police mostly accepts him (when they do not need to show him his wrong ways of course). And out of the blue, Bill Storm shows up - looking for his daughter - a singer called Zella.

Then Bill Storm is killed. And a war between two crime syndicates start heating up. With our hero in the middle.

The novel has its issues - it has inconsistent moments where Bywaters seems to be forgetting when his story is set and gives some characters almost 21st century sensibilities. Not that people thinking differently did not exist back them but if it was the case, it will be a bit more consistent.

It is a noir novel, a hard-boiled thriller designed based on the novels of the 30s; setting it in the 30s allows for a lot of genre tropes to be acceptable and welcome here. And it actually works. And I am happy that the author was brave enough to leave the novel as short as he did - it is similar to the novels of the era and it suits the text - nowadays everyone seems to be thinking that more is better.

I hope that Bywaters will write another novel about Fletcher - for a debut novel, this one was unexpectedly good. Which may explain how it won the Minotaur Books/Private Eye Writers of America Best First Private Eye Novel Competition of course. ( )

It is 1938 New Orleans. William Fletcher, prize fighter turn private investigator,RedStorm is mulling over his coffee at the local dive. Business is a bit slow since Negro investigators can only take on Negro clients. In walks Bill Storm, a thug Fletcher worked with a bit back in New York fifteen years earlier. He asks Fletcher to find his daughter, Zella, who he has not seen in as many years. Knowing the dangers of taking on a white client, Fletcher only agrees to poke around. Using his numerous contacts in the lower echelon of New Orleans society, it takes Fletcher less than an afternoon to find Zella. However, when Storm’s dead body is discovered in a park the next day, it is Zella, fearing for her life, who offers Fletcher a job, as her bodyguard. Storm’s murder is only the tip of a deadly iceberg engulfing two rival crime syndicates.

The Red Storm a debut novel by Grant Bywaters, who himself is a licensed private investigator, introduces two engaging characters in Fletcher and detective sergeant Brawley, Fletcher’s police buddy. The ancillary characters are engaging as well.

The writing is a bit stilted, alternating between 1930s pulp mystery vernacular (‘gats’ and ‘dames’) and current lingo. The author also felt compelled to describe every building that Fletcher entered. Totally unnecessary. The plot and action move along nicely, while sometimes a bit far-fetched. Fans of gritty New Orleans mysteries, such as Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead especially, might enjoy the historical aspect of this mystery. In general, a pleasant read and a reasonable first effort for the general mystery lover. ( )