Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

The 1922 map of North America in the front pages of the novel Cahokia Jazz looks familiar, but there is an extra state located on the Mississippi River across from St. Louis. It is labeled Cahokia. In Spufford’s reimagined history, Cahokia was created from land given to the Native American tribes in exchange for helping the Union win the Civil War.

Told through the lens of a noir detective story, Spufford has great fun imagining the political, religious, and cultural details of the diverse, industrial state of Cahokia, interweaving recognizable elements from the real 1920s, such as bootleggers, the Ku Klux Klan, G-men, and jazz.

The two detectives are the disreputable Phineas Drummond and his WWI comrade, Joe Barrow, a Native American who does not speak the fictional native language, Anopa, and often must rely on his white partner to translate. The two are assigned an ostensibly open and shut murder case which rapidly spins out of control imperiling the delicate political structure in Cahokia’s eponymous capital city.  During the investigation, Joe, who grew up in an orphanage, becomes increasingly interested in learning more about his heritage, and as the investigation proceeds, he begins to doubt his partner’s integrity. 

Very similar in method to Michael Chabon’s terrific police procedural, alternative Jewish-American history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which imagines the post WWII Jewish state located in Sitka, Alaska, rather than the Middle East.

I highly recommend both novels.