The Masquerades of Spring

The Masquerades of Spring (2024) Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London)

Set in New York City in 1926

This novella is everything.

It’s NYC during the jazz age.

Prohibition, that bizarre aberration of the American spirit, could be dashed confusing to someone raised in the free and easy metrop of old London.

And Nightingale has come to see out a musical instrument, imposing upon his schoolmate Gus.

This is Nightingale before the war–before Ettersberg.

I took a quick look over the parapet to make sure Nightingale hadn’t happened to anyone.

But the story is told by Gus, who is perhaps not quite so bright but very sweet.

Later, when I told Lucy about the love that dare not speak its name, he held me close and said that it may not speak its name, “But it sure as shit sings the blues.”

And there is so very much jazz.

Pretty soon we were having a friendly disagreement about whether Fats Waller owed anything to James P. Johnson, with Lloyd having the unfair advantage of being able to make his points by playing quotations on the ivories.

(T)he show, which was livened up considerably by a pair of male tap dancers who so astonished with their fluid dexterity that it was almost a relief when the chorus girls joined them and they had to slow down so the ladies could keep up.

“Have you heard Gladys Bentley yet?” he asked.

I said I had not, which only made the smile wider.

“I think it’s time we blow this scene,” he said, and half an hour later we were downstairs at a speakeasy on 133rd Street, breathing smoke, drinking terrible hooch and listening to a young coloured girl in a bow tie and short Eton jacket sing and play the piano all the way to morning.

And Ben Aaronovitch did a deep dive into the queer underground of the time.

The rules of the ball were simple: if you came as a lady then you could only dance with a gentlemen, and vice versa.

As expected, he doesn’t shy away from the racism of the time.

As Amelia explained it to me, because the landlords knew that the coloured folk couldn’t get lodgings in the white neighbourhoods, they could charge more than twice the normal rent. Since coloured folk mostly got paid half of what a white worker got, people in Harlem were nearly always short on the rent. To bridge the gap, the good citizens of Harlem had taken to holding rent parties in which private homes were turned into temporary nightclubs, at 25 cents per guest.

It’s a marvelous story, and the icing on the cake is that Nightingale outs himself as ace. (Not that the term was used then.)

I love it and I wanted to immediately sit back down and start reading again.

Cover map image by Stephen Walter. Title lettering by Patrick Knowles. Interior art Copyright by Giles Meakin

Characters: Augustus Berrycloth-Young, Lucien Gibbs, Thomas Nightingale, Maximillian Beauregard, Sergeant Bracknel, Laurence Ellwood, Gladys Bentley, David Edwards, Purlie Edwards, Mark Harper, Lloyd Beaumont, Mr. Steven Baker III, Cocoa/Amelia, Johnny Black, Old Fat Sam Milovic, Charles Jaeger, Mr. Clydesdale, Madame Zaza, A’Lelia Walker the Queen of Joy, David Mellenby, Harry Walter, Maurelle, Oriande

Publisher: Subterranean Press

Rating: 9/10

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