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Chasing the Devil’s Tail
(Valentin St. Cyr Storyville Mystery #1)
Storyville, New Orleans, 1907.
Along these scarlet streets, two thousand “sporting women” service gentlemen and rounders in grand mansions and filthy dime-a-trick cribs. The rye whiskey flows like a brown river and morphine and cocaine are sold over the counter. Meanwhile, the first crazy notes of the music they call “jass” are blasting out of the saloons and dance halls.
Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr pursues a killer among the hustlers, pimps, fancy men, madams, whores, and thieves who swarm the twenty blocks after the sun goes down. With a fascinating cast of characters that includes Tom Anderson, the “King of Storyville,” the lovely one-time “dove” Justine, the famed madam Lulu White, and the lunatic jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, Valentin polices a miasma of corruption and sin.
The Shamus Award-winning novel melds history and fiction in a tale of mayhem, madness, and murder in the only legally-sanctioned red light district in American history.
AWARDS AND PRAISE FOR CHASING THE DEVIL’S TAIL
—Best First Novel - 2002 Shamus Award
—Best of 2003 List - Borders Books
—Best New Series - Booklist
—Nominee - LA Times Book Prize
—Nominee - Barry Award
—Nominee - Falcon Award
“A beautifully constructed, elegantly presented time trip to a New Orleans of the very early 1900s. The characters are memorable and the period is brilliantly recaptured.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“The best part of this very good book is the writing, the see-it, feel-it, touch-it style. It’s a tribute to the power and demands of friendship, and an explication of the curse of the musical genius....”
—The Times-Picayune
“This atmospheric, accomplished novel brings to vivid, shocking life the mansions of vice with their ‘sporting girls’ and their madams and, above all, the tragic figure of King Bolden.”
—The Telegraph (U.K.)
“Top-notch suspense fiction in an evocative and harrowing time and place.”
—Jeffery Deaver
“A fascinating cast of characters in a novel steeped in a gumbo of race and class, set against a background of jazz.”
—Bookviews
“A believable and spellbinding story, which will echo like the mournful notes of good blues.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
“Fulmer effectively combines historical material—especially the story of Bolden’s descent into madness—with a satisfyingly complex mystery.”
—Booklist
“An exotic and erotic mixture of things we like: jazz, pimps, prostitutes, murder and dirty politics. David Fulmer is a fine writer.”—Nelson Demille
CHASING THE DEVIL’S TAIL is published by Crescent City Books