By Matt Cost
Sui generis: A person or thing that is unique, in a class by itself.
As writers, we strive to be unique. To have our distinct voice. If somebody were to read a page of one of my books and know, without looking, that I was the author, I would take that as the highest possible compliment. There are many ways to create this singularity of voice on the pages. It could be through description, dialogue, prose style, sentence rhythm, or theme, but for this blog, I'll focus on characters.
Historical PI mysteries offer ample opportunity to create extraordinary individuals AI can’t clone and spit back out in robotic fashion. In my Brooklyn 8 Ballo series, I have a Hungarian private investigator who is close friends with a Black entrepreneur, an Irish cop, and a Jewish journalist. In my upcoming debut series, 1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery, I follow those lines and explore a cast of diverse, inimitable characters even further.
My protagonist, Jazz Jones, is a white private investigator in 1950s Raleigh, North Carolina. This creation isn't much different from Phillip Marlowe, Lew Archer, or Mike Hammer. So, let’s make him unique. The first step was to make him a flashy dresser at a time when men all wore the same gray flannel suit and did whatever they could to fit in and not stand out. Jazz wore madras jackets in bold reds and greens with undertones of blues and yellows, white-and-black pigskin shoes, and a Dobbs Hanover Square Fedora.
Because of mistakes in his past, Jazz doesn’t drink alcohol. His drink of choice? Buttermilk. Clothing and buttermilk are only the window dressing, though. What sets Jazz apart from other gumshoes of the 1950s is that he is a white man raised in a Black family. His parents were (jazz) musicians who left him as an infant with his mom’s sister, a woman who had a Black husband in every sense of the word other than a legal document that didn’t allow for such commingling.
Jazz grew up with a Black man as his father figure, a white aunt who doubled as his mother, and four cousins who were really siblings of color. This lets him walk on both sides of the street in racially divided Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1955, creating opportunities and problems that open doors for me to explore as the pages turn.
Sharing the top billing spot with Jazz is January Queen, a powerful Black woman who is a representative of the NAACP, down from New York City, to investigate the lynching of a fifteen-year-old boy in her hometown of Raleigh, and hires Jazz to aid her search for justice. This is a time period when women were portrayed wearing frilly aprons as they cooked, cleaned, and raised children, or meeting their man at the door in high heels and a fancy dress, doing all they could to please him after his hard day of work.
January Queen is none of that. She is a single woman who kicks ass and takes no prisoners as she traverses the streets she grew up on. Abused at the hands of a white boy in her teens, January has a chip on her shoulder that drove her north for college and then a career. She has carved out a life that does not curtsy to men, especially not white men, a path that is more dangerous in the South than the North.
Some of the people of the pages of 1955 are typecast to create the proper background for Jazz and January to stick out. Charlie Davies is of British origin, has a Habsburg jaw that juts out, and is a cop in Raleigh and an acquaintance of Jazz’s. He has a big heart, means well, but struggles with the notion that segregation is wrong, believing that the races have fundamental differences. Barnaby Begbie is the sage bartender in the tavern where Jazz’s office is located in a back room.
I will be forced to gloss over the villains a bit, as their identity is kept on the down low for much of the book, even if we have our guesses, which could be multiple people, all of whom have unlikable traits, but only one of whom is pure evil. That, of course, is a rottenness of their heart, as the exterior of the person is painted up pretty and considered an upstanding citizen of Raleigh.
It is wonderful for me to create my own friends, people of the pages, who talk to me throughout the day and night. But as much as my imagination conjures these chums of mine, they also shape me as a person. In the end, then, I suppose, we are all just people of the pages, and we can determine who and what we want to be.
