Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans [Hardcover]

Jed Horne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 13, 2005

A searing anatomy of a New Orleans murder trial and a system of justice gone wrong.

In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984 ,two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried for Mrs. Dye's murder an unprecedented five times, though he maintained his innocence throughout each trial. Convicted and sentenced to death in his second trial, he would spend fourteen years on death row. After a fifth jury was unable to reach a verdict, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., finally conceded defeat and dropped the murder charge.

But the case slowly yielded a deeper drama: The crime turned out to have been the side effect of an intricately plotted act of revenge. That police and prosecutors may have been complicit in the vengeance that framed Kyles cuts to the heart of a system of justice for Southern blacks in the era since lynch mobs were shamed into obsolescence. A compellingly written legal drama that has at its heart passionate intrigue and justice gone awry.

 

Desire Street is a 2006 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"This much is certain and always was. That on a Thursday afternoon in late September 1984, a housewife named Delores Dye... ran afoul of a thief as she loaded a shopping cart of groceries into her car out front of a New Orleans supermarket." So begins Jed Horne's brisk, crisply written Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans, which follows the convoluted tale of how a small-time drug dealer and product of the New Orleans housing projects named Curtis Kyles, who was convicted, sentenced to death row, and finally exonerated in Dye's grisly murder.

Rarely does any murder case appear as straightforward as the one against Curtis Kyles. The murder weapon, a .32-caliber pistol, was found in his apartment; the victim's purse was discovered in a trash bag in front of his building; and a bag of cat food purchased on the day of Dye's murder--the exact brand her husband said she always bought--was stashed under Kyles's sink. The truth, of course, was not so simple. As subsequent trials revealed, Kyles's conviction was the product of overzealous prosecution, an incompetent court-appointed lawyer, false eyewitness testimony, and, Horne argues, an attempted framing. In the end, after five trials and nearly 14 years, Kyles's death sentence was overturned, and he was released from New Orleans prison in 1998. Horne, the city editor for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, doesn't shy from colorful, sometimes lurid turns of phrase. But if Horne is a crime writer, he is also a journalist, and his detailed account of the unraveling of the case against Curtis Kyles makes a compelling case that a justice system that wrongly convicts men like Kyles and sentences them to death is broken and badly in need of repair. --Erica C. Barnett

Review

"Desire Street is more than an important and resonant tale of race and crime--it is a page-turner, with a complex and magnetic criminal at its heart. It isn't easy to put this book down." -- Daniel Bergner, author of In The Land of Magic Soldiers

"This is a breath-taking true crime story that is at once the portrait of a complex city, a finely drawn gallery of memorable characters, and a passionate inquiry into the ever-thorny ambiguities of race. It's destined to become a New Orleans classic and to provoke a wide-ranging discussion about some of our most deeply held platitudes." --Andrei Codrescu, author of The Devil Never Sleeps

"Only in New Orleans could a true story like this read so much like a novel or have such an amazing cast of colorful characters. Jed Horne has produced a fascinating tale about a man accused of a murder that is more complex than it seems and a system that almost railroaded him into the electric chair. Anyone who cares about race and the justice system must read it." --Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

"Behind its devil-may-care front for tourists, New Orleans is troubled by a long history of corrupt law enforcement and neighborhoods afflicted with crime. Jed Horne knows this bizarre city, and he has delved into its darkest corners for this compelling story of murder, betrayal, false witness and official connivance." --Curtis Wilkie, author of Dixie

"Desire Street is the most authentic look at the code of the streets and the 'ever-astonishing folkways of the underclass,' in Jed Horne's characterization, that I've ever read. Curtis Kyles's story as told by Horne is an amazing chronicle of one man's journey from "poverty's machismo culture" to death row and back, and an extraordinary report of his legal struggle, but it is so much more than that: it is a detailed picture of the ways in which black men prey upon each other, of the cops' complicity because of their determination to protect their
fs20snitches, and the prosecutors who must win their cases even at the cost of justice. As a highly readable legal drama and story of desire and revenge, this book will grab you from the first page; more important, through Horne's accurate depiction of the tormented lives of Southern blacks, we begin to understand their fear, rage and desperation. From understanding comes hope for change." --Christine Wiltz, author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

"Jed Horne forces you to look into the dark heart of justice in America and defies you to look away. Desire Street is a tour de force of the storyteller's art--a profoundly insightful book deserving of the highest praise." --Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

"What Jed Horne does in this book is show you a right and wrong that runs beside guilt and innocence like the New Orleans streetcar runs beside heavy traffic. In a state and an area where the lines of the law have blurred into wrongdoing for two centuries, Horne takes a modern-day case and shows what can happen when a rush to convict overrides the protections of the system. Grippingly written, it leaves you with a shaken sense of a system we need to believe in." --Rick Bragg, author of All Over But the Shoutin'

"Desire Street is an absorbing story of the life-and-death legal battle that follows a murder. Told from different perspectives, it becomes a window into the horrific flesh-and-blood workings of the criminal justice system, where prejudice, politics, and professional ambitions--more than anything else--shape what passes for justice today. Unfortunately, the nightmarish world Horne reveals isn’t unique to New Orleans, nor to Louisiana." --Wilbert Rideau, editor of The Angolite, the inmate publication of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (January 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374138257
• ISBN-13: 978-0374138257
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #809,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars pushing the envelope. very refreshing, February 21, 2005

By 

Eric Mars - See all my reviews

This review is from: Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans (Hardcover)

Desire Street is going to freak out a few true-crime readers. (From some of the comments here, I guess it already has.) That's because it breaks all the rules. It pushes the envelope: a murder mystery that doesn't tell you what you have to think. (You actually have to figure it out yourself.); hard-assed, hard-boiled writing that doesn't think readers are too stupid to know some big words; a picture of a racist system but where no one wears a sheet over their head or burns a cross. (Racism these days is subtler than that.) Ever since I read "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," I have been waiting for something like this. It's set in New Orleans, instead of Savannah, and instead of Johnny Mercer in the background it's got Harry Connick. But it's just as rich. You may disagree with Desire Street, but you need to read it if you want to know where true crime is going. There's a lot more going on here than the usual book. Partly that's because there's more going on here than crime. But I couldn't put it down. And it's been the same reaction from friends of mine.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A story about a dream of justice, March 14, 2005

By 

Michael Jennings (Syracuse, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans (Hardcover)

Dolores Dye, a feisty, attractive, white, middle class grandmother, 60 years old and an ex-rodeo rider, lies dying in a supermarket parking lot, blood and brain fluid pooling beneath her, while her assailant, a young, dark-black man from one of the darkest city underbellies in America, a professional criminal by birth, brazenly maneuvers her red Ford into the line of cars exiting the lot before casually pulling out and vanishing into the thickening traffic: a murder in broad daylight, with eye-witnesses; a purse-snatching gone bad; a brutal, stupid, cowardly crime about to fan the racist flames in cops and prosecutors alike in a city already ablaze with white-flight and its attendant fear and loathing.

So begins Jed Horne's "Desire Street," subtitled "A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans," a 14-year saga of a dark crime brought slowly and painfully into light and focus. Not really a whodunit, but with the rolling thunder feel of one, its plot unfolding ever more surprisingly, and not a "private-eye" subterranean journey, but with more windows into worlds forbidden or otherwise inaccessible than that genre ever afforded, "Desire Street" draws us into the ghostly half-life of slum-warren junkies' somnolent predation, perverse symbiotic relationships of detectives and snitches, Death house despair, the layered world all the way up, finally, to the pristine and delicate machinations of Federal Supreme Court maneuverings.

We generally read non-fiction to learn stuff: how the world connects and works. But we tend to turn to fiction, with its comforting circles of clarity and closure, to story us through lives too often apparently just one damned thing after another. And if we're told non-fiction is the art of the age, we may darkly suspect that this may be related to the death of the American imagination, our curious confusion of fact with truth. How startling then to discover such a pure work of non-fiction, the reportage so thorough and seamless as to be nearly invisible, that also has the reverb and mythical splendor of a Faulkner tale.

I am tempted to call "Desire Street" hardboiled non-fiction, but it is too scrupulously written for that, too elegant, with almost a poet's sense of efficiency, rhythm and the mot juste: not a syllable sensationalized or self-indulgent; no conjecture or surmise; just facts and deeply understood characters marshaled with the almost invisible touch of a masterful storyteller possessed of a great journalist's eye and penchant for legwork. In this last regard, this is also clearly a work of great courage, at many levels. And it begets characters that get up and walk around in your head on your way to the drugstore or supermarket, haunting characters that "cast long shadows" as Faulkner liked to say.

It is a story that has found its perfect teller in a veteran journalist, long-time resident of the French Quarter, and City Editor of New Orleans' great old newspaper, The Times-Picayune, for whom truth has been a long-time, habitual pursuit. It is the story of twisted, old, cruel, beautiful New Orleans, a tale of bad men, bad cops, bad prosecutors; but then it is a story of good men, even those who have done bad things, good women, good, even brilliant lawyers and jurists, and of a Supreme Court ruling that truly brought greater justice to American courts. So finally it is a story of America, where justice, however fuzzy and far off, is still a dream for the few who still dare dream it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I was especially moved, September 6, 2005

By 

J. Karl - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans (Hardcover)

I had read this book one week prior to Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the canals. Desire Street, covers the New Orleans judicial and police systems in regard to a murder of a white woman in a supermarket parking lot by a black who framed an innocent black for the murder. The journalist put forth a fairly objective story line which took the reader deep into the 9th ward and the lives of the people we saw portrayed on our TV screens this week. Though I read it because we have Sister Prejean coming to town next week and I wanted to expand my opinions. Having read it prior to Hurricane Katrina made what was portrayed by the newscasts even more poignant and heart wrenching. If you want to better understand the pulse of what once was, New Orleans you'd be wise to put this book in your cart.