Hudson Lake [Paperback]

Laura Mazzuca Toops (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 15, 2007

In the summer of 1926, jazz lovers from all over the Midwest go where the weather is hot and the music is hotter. They converge on the Blue Lantern Inn, a rural Indiana dance hall in a resort town where the season's resident jazz band features a young cornet player named Bix Beiderbecke.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In the summer of 1926, the Jean Goldkette jazz band, led by sax player Frankie Trumbauer and featuring 23-year-old cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, landed a season-long gig at the Blue Lantern dance hall on Hudson Lake in rural Indiana. The culture clash that resulted between the gin-swilling band members and the stuffy townspeople, fueled by Indiana Klansmen on one hand and Chicago gangsters on the other, is the subject of Toops' evocative jazz-age novel. At the center of the tale is the mercurial Beiderbecke, whose star shone brightly but briefly in the jazz world. Like Frederick Turner in his fictional ode to Bix, 1929 (2003), Toops portrays the troubled yet brilliant horn player as torn between his devotion to music and his guilt over disappointing his straitlaced parents. Added to the mix here is a fictional romance between Bix and a college student. The romantic element drifts too close to melodrama, but Toops' ability to capture the intoxicating mix of energy and danger that defined the early days of jazz makes the novel required reading for anyone caught up in the enduring Bix legend. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Hudson Lake is a vivid, poignant, sexy tale of the Jazz Age... --Reviewed by Kevin Baker, author of "Dreamland," "Paradise Alley" and "Strivers Row."

...a good read and ...a probable account of the times and tunes of this early jazz era. --John Russell Grist, host of the Midwest Ballroom, WDCB 90.9 FM.

Ms. Toops has a profound gift for winding an atmosphere in, around, and through every moment of her book. --Reviewed by Jeanette Cottrell

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Twilight Times Books (February 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933353570
• ISBN-13: 978-1933353579
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,955,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author Laura Mazzuca Toops is a Chicago-based writer with more than 20 years of professional experience. Her writing, editing and reporting experience includes stints at Chicago's legendary City News Bureau, Crain Communications, freelance work for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, and other local and national publications. She also worked for five years as a film critic for a Chicago monthly entertainment magazine. Her short fiction has been published in several local little magazines, and she has studied at writing workshops at the University of Chicago. She is the author of three published novels (Hudson Lake, Slapstick and The Latham Loop)and a nonfiction book, A Native's Guide to Chicago's Western Suburbs. She has taught fiction writing at several local venues, including the College of DuPage.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All That Jazz and much more, July 9, 2008

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hudson Lake (Paperback)

In 1926, in spite of being out of the way in a remote rural part of Indiana, the hottest jazz spot in the Midwest is the Blue Lantern Club on Hudson Lake. Especially popular amongst aficionados is the Jean Goldkette Orchestra featuring highly regarded Bix Beiderbecke on the coronet.

Bix has come to isolated Indiana to avoid life as he failed at love, family, and now alcohol. Women love the great coronetist, but they accept that in Bix's mind jazz comes before them; locals and those from Chicago and Indianapolis accept that is part of Bix; his Iowa family never did. Of course I.U. student Harriet understood what a fling with a musician meant until Bix; Joy, a flapper who hangs out with gangsters, also has interest in Bix. However, women and jazz may mix, but the big city mob wants bootlegged alcohol and jazz to mix too; whereas the Ku Klux Klan plans to own the conservative area, which means no big city jazz. Bix has no time for either violent group as his two women have become possessive.

This superb biographical fiction tale brings to life the Jazz Age in the Midwest as the audience gets an in close look at the band, obviously Bix, and their personal issues re doubts about skills and family. The invasions by the KKK and the Chicago mob add depth to the 1920s in Indiana. However, this is Beiderbecke's tale in every sense as his struggles to be loved and accepted are fraught with self tormenting doubt and self destruction when he could not cope with accolades even as he begged people to praise his work. HUDSON LAKE is a strong historical tale in which the reader gains a vivid glimpse of a bygone Americana era through the travails of Bix and the band.

Harriet Klausner

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Jazz Age Novel, February 22, 2007

By 

Laura D "opera buff" (Pittsburgh, PA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Hudson Lake (Paperback)

The atmosphere of mid-1920's Mid-America is captured in a spectacular manner by Laura Mazzuca Toops' new novel. This work is fiction based on fact: in 1926 the Jean Goldkette jazz orchestra took on a season-long assignment at the summer resort of Hudson Lake, Indiana - a location populated by both conservative, straitlaced townsfolk heavily influenced by the Ku Klux Klan which threatened to rule the community (and many Indiana communities just like it) and the hedonistic big city weekenders from Chicago - jazz musicians, gangsters, and the devoted audiences who followed both. The authentic characters are the talented Goldkette musicians Frank Trumbauer, Doc Ryker, Pee Wee Russell - and Bix Beiderbecke, the enigmatic, alluring jazz-age genius whose personality is marvelously portrayed, crackling with realism and flanked by two fictional love interests: Joy, a tragic young woman desperate to escape her sordid past, and Harriet, a college student employed at the resort for the summer, lured away from conventionality by her growing passion for the brilliant musician.

Immediately the reader is drawn into their world, bouncing from the sweaty gin-soaked dance hall to a quiet fishing boat on the lake; from a bucolic waterside to roadsters roaring down dusty country roads on late-night errands ranging anywhere from replenishing illegal liquor supplies to retaliation of Klan outrages; to tender and beautifully realized scenes of sexual passion.

Every voice rings as authentic, as if the author herself divulged more than from every biographical account and anecdote exactly how Beiderbecke and his bandmates might have - could have - acted and sounded: Pee-Wee Russell's brash, smuttily jocular taunting; Tram's endeavors to discipline his musicians and hold them back from too much errant excess, and especially Bix, the jaunty humor not quite hiding that he's inwardly tormented, self-disparaging and sensitive, convinced at heart he is undeserving of the creative pinnacle he strives for.

It would seem superfluous to describe this novel as exciting, steamy, poignant and authentic in ambience, but it is. Even those unfamiliar with the works of the great jazz artists of that era will be swept away by a story as thrilling and romantic as the 1920's were themselves, as accurately represented in the dangerous drama of the gangster underworld and frightening Klan in that vividly colorful decade.

- Laura Demilio

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hudson Lake. . .Who Knew?, October 9, 2007

By 

M. Bernstein "giant rider" (Long Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Hudson Lake (Paperback)

Boy, do I know this place?

More about that later.

This is a fond look back at a time and place when that place had some importance. Hudson Lake. Around 90 miles by auto from Chicago's North Side's Green Mill), through Whiting (also know as, Stink City for it's odiferous oil refineries), Gary, Ind, La Porte, Rolling Prarie.. . .Less by South Shore. Well you get the picture. I know this place.

The Jazz Age is in full bloom. Some of it's stars were rising, but one in particular was going super nova.

This book has the likes of Bix Beiderbeke and the Jean Goldkette band which spent a summer one July in 1926 at this out-of-the way community, Hudson Lake. Jean had rented the Blue Lantern and brought his band up from St. Louis to over-summer. Not a bad place, after all. A picture perfect lake, cabins, and ready access from Chicago via that neat electric train, Chicago, South Bend and South Shore RR (still running).

The story revolves around Bix, and one of Bix's loves - Joy, who has her own chapters. His other love, a local (Hoosier), Harriett is part of the story also. Throw in the reed section of the Goldkette band, the lake, a steamy summer and fill it all out with bootleg booze, Al Capone's mob and the KKK and you have a pretty fair yarn.

However, the story is really Bix and Joy and Hudson Lake. The other stuff is filler which, I think kinda fleshes out the time and place.

Good historical fiction, too me has to make me feel the place and time. Can I hear Bix's solos? What does Hudson Lake, or rather what did Hudson Lake feel like? Not just the lake, but the community. When it's hot and steamy, can I feel it - the discomfort, the clothes sticking to body, always wet. . .like that.

And what about the music? I've grown up with jazz, tho Bix was before my time. Fortunately I have several CD's. Listening to those CD's now - I finally listened to Bix's solos. Wow!

Laura captures the time and place. If the story had Bix, Joy the band and the bootleggers, I think that would have been enough. But this is Laura's story.

At that, I had to remind myself that this Hudson Lake is fictional.

And, perhaps mine is also. The mythology of the place was that the, "Big Bands" had played at the Casino. I for one never thought much about that. That certainly was another time, if not another place.

Yep. Hudson Lake. Put on a couple of Bix CD's (or if you're real lucky, his records) and curl up with the book. Feel the sweat on your body. Let Bix's solos wash over you.

Hudson Lake.