THE GIRL IN THE GREEN DRESS, well-fictionalized historical murder case

THE GIRL IN THE GREEN DRESS
MARIAH FREDERICKS
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the author of The Lindbergh Nanny comes an evocative mystery about the 1920 murder of the gambler Joseph Elwell, featuring New Yorker writer Morris Markey and Zelda Fitzgerald.

At the dawn of the Jazz Age, Morris Markey arrives in New York to become a writer. Having served in France, he needs to be in a place so distracting he cannot hear himself think. New in town, Markey hovers at the edge of the city’s revels, unable to hear the secrets that might give him his first Big Story. Finally one night he spots Joseph Elwell, a man about town known for courting wealthy married women, with a glorious girl in a dress of silver and dollar green.

The next morning, Elwell’s housekeeper runs out into the street screaming that Elwell has been shot. Every door and window in the house is locked. Did the ravishing woman kill her paramour? At last, Morris Markey has his story.

To penetrate the glittering world of Joseph Elwell, Markey turns to the newly famous Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who met Elwell the same fateful night he night. Bored while Scott is working on his next novel, Zelda offers to help Markey with his investigation.

Together, Markey and Zelda learn that there were many people in Elwell's life who had reason to want him dead. And when a second man is found shot in his home in a very similar way, Markey begins to suspect that the truth may be more complicated—a story so dangerous that after he finishes it three decades later, he himself is found dead in his home, a single bullet through his head.

Mariah Fredericks's third standalone novel based on a true story from New York City's glamorous past, The Girl in the Green Dress is a truly standout historical mystery.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The past is an inexhaustible goldmine for novelists. Author Fredericks works it with skill, and a very discerning eye...there's enough fact to get a really good story here, but not enough to make a microhistory true-crime book of. That's a storyteller at work, discerning the bones of an involving story!

The story told is pretty emblematic of prosperity's victims. Young, ambitious, seeing around them all the world through the envious lens of desire, of greed for more; and yet, innocent youth does not see the cost of it despite their focus on a failure of existing social rules. We're all blinkered by something we do not examine in youth, and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the poster girl for it. She lived a life of glamour and sophistication in the 1920s that utterly beguiled many...especially Morris Markham, newly arrived reporter seeking the case that could make his name in Jazz Age New York.

I was very aware of the 2000s "manic pixie dream girl" vibes coming from Zelda in a way I had not seen before. There's a sadness and frailty in Zelda's real life story, but this use of her troubled mind bothered me...Markey used Zelda for her connections, fell for the of her image that he created (like so many others in her life), and she was so bored she hopped on his ambition to bag the story to amuse herself. It felt uneasily like a transactional acquaintance. Hence the missing half-star.

As that was not unusual for the times, those or ours, I merely note the fact in case it bothers others as well. It feels like the sort of thing Zelda would've been deeply familiar with, being an intelligent woman in a society that does not much value those beings.

So Markey, with Zelda's help getting into the Right Sort's parties and homes, sets about learning all he can about the murdered man. We're along with him, in third person close PoV, so it does feel like a real-time unfolding of the absurd and artificial world of the moneyed elite in crisis. Asking questions and listening in, discussing the murder victim's many shenanigans, all of it happens as we see the people in that world enacting some very peculiar social rituals around drinking, drugging, and sexing each other up. The Great War recently past damaged those off the battlefield, differently to be sure, as those on it. These times were in flux as institutions rattled and broke; the idols were changing; and Zelda was shoving statues off pedestals to the admiring eyes of Markey in the crowd around her.

As expected after her fictionalization of the Lindbergh kidnapping, Author Fredericks is scrupulous in pointing out her inventions, embroiderings, and naming her sources for the story. It is a big part of the reason I trust her to tell me a tale...she tells me when she's departing from the facts. The biggest departure was the central sleuthing duo...they never met in real life! I suppose that's a spoiler. oh well, so be it, you're reading a review so it can't be too surprising. I was completely convinced by their world as drawn here, so just accepted it was all real for the duration. Great work!

As this story centers on an unsolved murder, bookended by a very suspicious death, the very nature of it is to be uncertain...however, it does not feel unfinished as a story. No one who has lived a long enough life really believes in neatly tied-up ends, that's often why people read series-character mystery novels. I don't think that reader will necessarily be thrilled by the looseness of the ending as it is not a tidy resolution on that level.

It very much is a good story, for all that, and a terrific way to wile away a day.