Customer Reviews

Bourbon Street

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Set in 1958 during Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street opens with Deke Watley, a nomadic gambler who has accepted an invitation to a high stakes Poker tournament sponsored by one of New Orleans's notorious residents, a blinded, aging gangster, August Moreau. Carnival is in full swing - filling the streets with a myriad of bejeweled masked strangers. However, when Deke meets his fellow opponents, he realizes they are as equally eccentric. Alex is August's angry, mulatto son from an island prostitute rumored to have dabbled in voodoo; Honey is the retired madam of one of the city's largest and most lucrative whorehouses; milquetoast Pritchett is August's lawyer and the keeper of secrets of all the dirty deeds; Pritchett's wife is a jealous whore-turned-housewife who has not changed her ways and finds pleasure in the backseats of cars along dark streets; and Hannah, a blonde bombshell, is August's young mistress and Deke's former love from a distant past.

Although fairly short in length (169 pages), the suspense builds from the opening pages and accelerates as the plot thickens to involve all the above mentioned players (and others unnamed but equally enigmatic) to weave a tale of revenge, double-crossing, murder, and an unexpected finale (at least it was a surprise to me). The characters are wonderfully broken and tormented - each nursing their wounds as best they can. Gaiter's writing is strong as reflected in the vivid images he describes - I saw the atmospheric haze, I felt the heat, I heard the music, I inhaled the cigarette smoke, and I visualized the sweat dripping from the characters. He added more realism by carefully interlacing the complexities of race relations and social inequalities of the day amid the decadent backdrop of the Big Easy. I enjoyed the story and highly recommend it to those who might enjoy reading about this era and the suspense/crime genre.

Reviewed by Phyllis
APOOO BookClub
Nubian Circle Book Club

4 stars
I generally don't like gambler stories, but the idea of Mardi Gras made
me pick this one up and I'm glad I did. While it's a short book,
there's a lot going on, especially with the characters. The writer
manages to give both the characters and the plot equal time. I also
really liked the writing. It's not your typical somewhat bland
mystery/thriller prose.

Two dimensional characters, a clunky plot, and a comprehensive ignorance of the actual Bourbon Street makes this novel an awkward, difficult, and tedious effort. Is Alex Moreau mad? Is Deke a pawn? Is August the monster? Who cares? Who can tell them apart? In most scenes, it takes notes to figure out who is present.

Even on a flight across the country, the inflight "Skymall" catalog proved a more interesting and better written text.

A book to avoid at all costs.

5 stars
Great period noir mood piece. Writer obviously knows the genre. There are tips of the hat here to films like "The Big Heat" and "Lady From Shanghai." Like in the movies, everything here is larger than life. It's an almost expressionistic vision of New Orleans through a really dark lens. I've read that Deke was the main character, the real main character is Alex. Half-black and wanting revenge against his own
father, he'll stop at nothing to get what he wants. Through this character in 1958 (and others, particularly the women), the writer says a lot about privilege, power, and imprisonment, and how all of them can work together to tragic result.

Bourbon Street has been the center stage for incalculable stories. However, in
Leonce Gaiter's debut novel of the same name, that infamous stretch of asphalt is merely
window dressing for the true face of New Orleans to hide behind.
It's Mardi Gras, 1958. Deke Wately steps from a Greyhound Bus into the wild
and wicked carnival atmosphere. "Frenzy reigned on Bourbon Street. Barrel fires
burned, and the bodies cavorting around them seemed as rapt as lewd priests at dead
men's pyres. Deke couldn't take three steps without some drunk man or woman
slamming into him. He was the only one on the street not ricocheting wildly with a
rapacious smirk on his face or his private lusts smeared, draped, painted and sequined all
over his body. Men and women screamed at the noise."
Deke, a second-rate gambler and nomad, is uncomfortable in the masked city.
But he's been invited to play in wealthy gangster August Moreau's personal game; the
stakes are too high. As he enters the private L'hotel Moreau, he first meets the deformed
Ray, who hides behind a mask; then Jimmy, the well-tailored, gun-toting bellman;, then
Deke comes face to face with the book's real protagonist Alex, Moreau's mulatto son
whose desire to revenge his mother's death drives him to the very edge of insanity.


Alex shuffles the other players while he thrusts Deke at his father's mistress, the blonde bombshell, Hannah, as part of his revenge. Hannah. The girl Deke bedded and the woman he abandoned. Now that he's seen her again, "he wanted to savor that moment when they first caught of each other. She was his past, the bridge between who he was and who he was becoming. She was that piss-poor Texas town. She was his irreclaimable youth, his resting place." He heard she'd killed a man so Deke had more to worry about than an angry female. The narrative weaves between the debauchery of Bourbon Street, the Ten Spot Bar where Deke is sent to face more than Hannah's long-held wrath, and the L'hotel Moreau, where umpteen hidden agendas are waiting to be dealt and played. After a savage beating at the Ten Spot, Deke stumbles through the writhing crowd and back to the hotel. "He felt safe once he put his hand on the gate of the L'hotel Moreau. He didn't have the presence of mind to note the irony. What at first seemed foreign and frightening to him now had been supplanted by horrors far worse, that it had become a comfort." Deke watches in dismay as he learns that the game he came to play is more than cards and the hand he holds isn't a winner.
Chapter One has too many similes for my taste but after that the narrative smooths out. The story is dense, much in the Faulknarian style with an intricate use of language, themes of racism, and clashing between the Old and New South. Yet the soul-stirring beat of jazz pulsates behind the words, forcing the pages apart.

The true story of Bourbon Street lies in its shadows; the places Deke can't really see and the images Alex can't forget. Gaiter's Bourbon Street is best for what it isn't than what it is. The plot, although intricate, is rather predictable and the ending is rather cheesy, but that voice. Oh that voice trumpets loud and long of a new talent surfacing in the literary world.

Intense, wicked fun. This book turns Mardi Gras into noir-ish feast of longing and vengeance. Ne'er-do-well gambler Deke Watley comes to New Orleans for an annual poker game, not knowing he's been invited by the half-mad, half-black son of a powerful white gangster. The son seeks revenge against his father for his mother's death, and seeks freedom from the velvet prison in which his father keeps him caged. He plans
to use Deke as a pawn in his schemes. Add a couple of scheming women with plans of their own, and the game is set. Great atmosphere, interesting twists on the 1958 racial politics, and wonderfully written.

...like insects on a carcass." In prose that shines with originality and images that burn the psyche, Bourbon Street is liberally laced with the violence that is endemic to the novel, set in 1958 New Orleans, where a mixed-race son, the fruit of a damned coupling, is pitted against his lot in life. The story is riddled with breathtaking moments of unexpected brutality that quickly fades into the chaotic merriment of Mardi Gras insanity, the dizzy swirl of instant gratification, the wild, decadent dance before All Saint's Day shuts down the Devil's celebration for a brief period of atonement.

The story opens with a poker game at L'Hotel Moreau, this time infused with the fresh blood of Deke Watley, a marginally successful gambler out of his depth with these players. Watley has been invited to sit in on Alex Moreau's game, although the Texan soon finds that there is more in store for him than a game of cards. Psyched for the challenge and eager to win, Watley is astonished when he runs into Hannah, a woman from his shameful past. Years ago, Deke turned his back on Hannah, an act he has since regretted. It is unbelievable that he should find her now in this place.

Once Deke discovers Hannah, the skeletons rattle free from their cobwebbed closets, old secrets freed, haunting tales of love, hate and simmering rage. August Moreau virtually owned Alex's mother, a black woman of great strength and pride, certainly a match for the man's unbridled hubris. Their endless power struggle pushes them to the brink, where the black woman is left dead and the wealthy white man blinded. August's casual brutality is passed on to a son who barely knows the meaning of affection. Trapped in the horrific tableau of his parent's contretemps, Alex's sole mission is to avenge his mother's unspeakable death.

Both Alex and August have committed unspeakable acts, surrounded by the decadent souls who live in their sick world, tied to the elder Moreau by greed or infamy. In this tug of war all are pawns, even Hannah and Deke, and nothing is as it first appears. Rapier-like, Gaiter's incisive prose slashes through these distorted lives, ripping away genteel facades, a monochromatic wasteland soaked in the bright red of spilled blood, human elixir reduced to a common hue. Purging his character's embattled emotions, Gaiter lays bare the truth of racial hatred, the distortions of years spent in a silent war, the child paying the exorbitant price of his parent's destructive union.

In his black-hearted thriller, the author mines the dark side of human nature, where betrayal oozes from every corner, giving no quarter, each character face to face with his own worst nightmare and sold-out soul. The hall of mirrors becomes a house of horrors as the occupants of L'Hotel Moreau are sacrificed to their greed and the consuming rage of a broken son, as Alex degenerates finally into the same monstrous decadence of his father. None of the characters, after all, are redeemable. Luan Gaines/2005.

BOURBON STREET is the story of a complicated family whose visceral interest in poker leads the other characters through a labyrinth of games. The story starts out detailing the purpose of the Moreaus' poker extravaganza, but soon strays to more carnal issues amidst the decadence of Mardi Gras and post-war New Orleans.

August Moreau is a wealthy man whose ego is so massive that he made the arrogant mistake of thinking his white society friends would accept him living openly with his black mistress, Christine, and rejoice with him at the birth of his mixed race son. He soon discovers who his real friends are and makes a point to keep them close and his enemies closer through brutal vigilante enforcement of his every desire.

Alex Moreau is a bi-racial, very disturbed, and very angry young man whose invincibility has been assured by his white father's notorious menace and wealth. No one in New Orleans would dare cross August Moreau, even if he did elevate his bastard son higher than most white men. His treatment of Alex provokes outrage and alienation among the citizenry, but it is Christine's death that drives a permanent wedge between father and son. Her death and his tenuous position in life - a wealthy black man with no real power of his own - fuels his rage and creates a desire to obliterate everything that is Moreau.

Using an annual poker game to set his vicious plan in motion, Alex has invited a new player to the game in addition to his father's usual select guest list for this high stakes affair, and Deke Watley, a two-bit card hustler from Dallas, can't resist the urge of easy money and lots of it. Deke's greed leads him back to a former love whose tarnished image has evolved, yet remained the same, over the years. Now, she is trying to find a way to bury it in the past and re-incarnate her lost innocence by betraying the only person who could redeem her.

Leonce Gaiter is rapidly ensconcing himself as a master of noire mystery. His characters in BOURBON STREET literally jump off the page at you. Their pasts, feelings, and secret motives are known instantly, but the mystery of the story is preserved until the end. The gift is that his characters are not scripted in narrative, but carved lovingly in dialogue and action. From semi-shrouded Ray, whose soul has become as scarred as his face, to hard-hearted Hannah, who only wants to be clean and pure again in everyone's eyes, Gaiter does an exceptional job of making the reader see, feel, hear, and smell the sights, sounds, and textures of Mardi Gras 1958.

Reviewed by Kim Anderson Ray
of The RAWSISTAZ™ Reviewers

"Loved this. This guy writes like the bastard of William Faulkner and Jim Thompson." A terrific read!