the last book I ever read (The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis, excerpt four)

from The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis:

There’s an old novel called Black No More, about a scientist who invents a cream that’s able to turn black people white and the social havoc this brings about, written in the thirties by George Schuyler, a newspaperman. When I was a kid, Dad always used to grin when any of his friends mentioned it. And Mom said she’d whip me if she ever caught me reading it. Till I did, I thought it was about sex.

the last book I ever read (The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis, excerpt three)

from The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis:

They walked to the door and damned if they didn’t turn around together at the last minute and, raising their hands to chest level, close them into fists. It looked like it was choreographed. Then they went out the door. Damned if I know how they’d lived this long. If the cops don’t get you, the crackers will.

But anyhow, I had a case.

Power to the people.

the last book I ever read (The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis, excerpt two)

from The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis:

Bobbie brought me another beer. Maybe she figured I needed it.

“At any rate,” Blackie went on, “it was to have been at the Municipal Auditorium, the eighteenth of August, at eight p.m. She was coming in early that morning to speak to some student groups at Tulane and Loyola. She did that wherever she went. Spoke to students, I mean.”

the last book I ever read (The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis, excerpt one)

from The Long-Legged Fly: A Lew Griffin Novel by James Sallis:

I got up and went to the window, taking the bourbon with me. I put it down in one gulp and put the glass on the sill. Down in the street a group of kids were playing what looked like cops and robbers. The robbers were winning.

the last book I ever read (Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, excerpt twelve)

from The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury:

A few of the best brothels regularly employed orchestras of from two to four instruments, which played each night in the ballroom from about seven o’clock to closing, which was usually at dawn. The other depended upon the groups of itinerant musicians who frequently appeared in Storyville, playing in the streets and saloons for coins and drinks. One of the most popular of these combinations – though not for dancing – was a company of boys, from twelve to fifteen years old, who called themselves the Spasm Band. They were the real creators of jazz, and the Spasm was the original jazz band. There were seven members besides the manager and principal organizer, Harry Gregson, who was the singer of the outfit – he crooned the popular songs of the day through a piece of gas-pipe, since he couldn’t afford a proper megaphone. The musicians were Emile Lacomb, otherwise Stalebread Charley, who played a fiddle made out of a cigar-box; Willie Bussey, better known as Cajun who performed entrancingly upon the harmonica; Charley Stein, who manipulated an old kettle, a cow-bell, a gourd filled with pebbles, and other traps and in later life became a famous drummer; Chenee, who smote the bull fiddle, at first half a barrel and later a coffin-shaped contraption built by the boys; Warm Gravy; Emile Benrod, called Whisky, and Frank Bussey, known as Monk. The three last-named played whistles and various horns, most of them home-made, and each had at least three instruments, upon which he alternated. Cajun Bussey and Stalebread Charley could play tunes upon the harmonica and the fiddle, and the other contributed whatever sounds chanced to come from their instruments. These they played with the horns in hats, standing upon their heads, and interrupting themselves occasionally with lugubrious howls. In short, they apparently originated practically all of the antics with which the virtuosi of modern jazz provoke the hotcha spirit, and sometimes downright nausea. The Spasm boys even screamed “hi-de-hi” and “ho-de-ho” – and incidentally these expressions, now the exclusive howls of Negro band-leaders, were used in Mississippi River songs at least a hundred years ago.

the last book I ever read (Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, excerpt eleven)

from The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury:

Sicilian criminals appeared in New Orleans soon after the beginning of the great wave of immigration from southern Europe before the Civil War, and within a few years were operating in well-organized bands in various parts of the city. As early as 1861, on June 22, the True Delta declared that “recent developments have satisfied the police of the city that an organized gang of Spanish and Sicilians thieves and burglars have long made their headquarters in the Second and Third Districts.” Two months later the same newspaper reported the arrest of a band of Sicilian counterfeiters and again called attention to the presence in New Orleans of large numbers of Sicilian robbers and assassins. On March 19, 1869 the Times said that the Second District was infested by “well-known and notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters and burglars, who, in the last month, have formed a sort of general co-partnership or stock company for the plunder and disturbance of the city.” This “co-partnership” was the Stoppagherra Society, organized as a branch of the Mafia by four men, who, driven from Palermo by the Sicilian authorities, arrived in New Orleans early in 1869. The assassins of the Stoppagherra quickly disposed of a gang of Messina men who attempted to set up a rival band in the autumn of 1869, and thereafter the Mafia was the dominating element in Italian crime, not only in New Orleans but elsewhere in the United States, for with the Louisiana metropolis as headquarters, branches were soon established in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and other large cities. To these havens of refuge and opportunity, largely through the kind offices of politicians who found the Mafia a great help at election times, flowed a stream of criminals from Sicily and other parts of Italy. In New Orleans alone during the late 1880’s, according to the Italian Consul, Pasquale Corte, there were a hundred escaped Italian criminals, not one of whom had entered the country legally. Many had become naturalized citizens. These desperadoes, and other members of the Mafia, kept the Italian colony of New Orleans in a state of terror for more than twenty years, and grew rich and powerful upon the proceeds of robbery, extortion, and assassination, most of the victims being fellow-countrymen who had failed to pay the sums demanded by the Mafia leaders. A few of these killings – there were about seventy during the two decades – were committed with knives, but in most of them the murderers used a weapon known to the New Orleans police as “the Mafia gun” – a shotgun with the barrels sawed off to about eighteen inches, and the stock sawed through near the trigger and hollowed out. The stock was then fitted with hinges, and the entire gun folded up like a jackknife. It was carried inside the coat on a hook. Loaded with slugs or buckshot, it was as deadly a weapon up to thirty yards as had ever been devised.

the last book I ever read (Herbert Asbury's The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld, excerpt ten)

from The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld by Herbert Asbury:

The fame of New Orleans as the gayest place on the North American continent was spread by the ballrooms, the cafes and coffee-houses, the hotels and restaurants, the elegant gambling-establishments, and the unrestrained merriment of the Mardi Gras festival. But the fact that at the same time the city was notorious throughout the world as a veritable cesspool of sin was principally due to the prevalence of prostitution, which in turn was due to the tolerances with which it was regarded by the authorities and the people generally. This attitude, eagerly embraced by the American politician because of the protection it afforded to one of his most lucrative fields of graft, was based upon the Latin viewpoint that prostitution was an inevitable and necessary evil, to be regulated rather than suppressed; it became such a definite municipal characteristic that it persisted until comparatively recent years. From Bienville to the World War commercialized vice was the most firmly entrenched phase of underworld activity in New Orleans; it was not only big business on its own account, owning some of the best property in the city and giving employment to thousands, but was also the foundation upon which the keepers of the concert-saloons, cabarets, dance-houses, and other low resorts reared their fantastic structures of prosperity. Without the lure of the harlot it is doubtful if such districts as the Swamp and Gallatin Street, and the Franklin Street area which Bison Williams described as “the only locality in the city where decent people do not live,” could have existed.