Crime Fiction
Palace Council by A by Stephen L Carter (Jonathan Cape)
Stephen L Carter writes novels about the black American bourgeoisie and shoves in the odd murder to disguise his work as crime fiction.
A Yale Law School professor, he published a number of well-regarded books on legal topics before his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, turned him into a literary sensation. Emperor featured law professor Talcott Garland, son of a murdered conservative black judge, searching for his father’s killer.
At nearly 700 pages, it was longer than it needed to be, but nonetheless fascinating in its portrait of an upper-class black American family and that world.
Palace Council, his third novel, is also too long but so compelling that one carries on. It is set in the somnolent 1950s and the turbulent 1960s and features a novelist, Eddie Wesley, in love with the wife of one of the Garland clan, Aurelia Treene.
Where The Emperor of Ocean Park focused largely on Washington DC, and a second book on New England, much of the action in Palace Council happens in a Harlem of matriarchs who set the rules and freeze out the unworthy — the sort of social commentary one reads Carter’s books for.
To simplify the convoluted plot: Eddie stumbles over a body as he makes his way home from Aurelia’s engagement party. The corpse is clutching a gold inverted cross with the inscription ‘We shall be free”.
The talisman continues turning up in odd places, and Eddie asks his sister, a Harvard law student, what it might mean. She’s cagey, and then disappears, and when Eddie goes looking
for her, he gets caught up in a bizarre political conspiracy.
Historical figures, both literary and political, walk through Palace Council: Langston Hughes; the Kennedys, Joe, John and Robert; Richard Nixon; J Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI for decades.
And as Eddie searches for clues to his sister’s disappearance, in the south, in New England, in Vietnam, there are wonderful sketches of minor characters and walk-ons: a super-liberal couple, an assassin, spies, lawyers and academics.
It’s a good tour of the years that changed the United States — and for Carter it’s a short book: only 510 pages.