Customer Reviews

The King of Ragtime (Ragtime Mysteries)

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

 

 

In the summer of 1916 Martin Niederhoffer worked for Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder, Music Publishers as a bookkeeper with an eye to his future. He also took piano lessons from Scott Joplin. Martin loved Scott's music and convinced Mr. Joplin to take his musical drama "If" to Irving Berlin to be produced. With bad blood over an earlier piece of music between Joplin and Berlin, and Scott already a very sick man, this was a situation ripe for confrontation.

Martin has discovered discrepancies in the company books pointing to someone skimming money from the company. After spending all day working on the missing money, Martin is told to stay late to finish up his regular work. Birdie, his girlfriend and assistant, has already gone home when his friend Sid Altman arrives to wait for Martin to finish so that they can go to the fights. Martin goes to the men's room and when he returns to his office he finds a dead body and Scott Joplin standing over it with the weapon in his hand.

From here on it is a race to keep the police from finding Scott Joplin and to find "If." The problem of Scott's missing music is taken up by his former publisher, John Stark, at the request of Stark's daughter Nell. still a close friend of Joplin.

This is a tightly written story with ample twists and turns. The characters spring to life with an flourish that is delightful. Mr. Karp caught New York in the summer, and especially the summer of 1916, in a truly admirable manner. I could almost smell, hear, and taste the city of the story. Each character is almost a story on its own. The blending of the different personalities was a delight and I found myself humming ragtime in my head.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in music, history, or just a desire for a finely tuned mystery.

I read this book along with the other two in the trilogy, and in my estimation it suffers a bit in comparison with the other two. Karp may or may not have nailed the historical characters, but somehow they don't quite come to life as well as, say, Brun Campbell in the latest work. One thing that kept catching me off guard was poor proofreading, particularly in the misuse of quotation marks. Yes, the words were there but I found it distracting.

Another distraction was historic anachronisms, like having a girl singer using a microphone (in 1916?!!) and a reference to a neon-lighted sign. Don't think those came along in popular use quite yet, Larry; and also reading about a character on a train leaving from East St. Louis bound for New York and traveling through the Missouri countryside. Mr. Karp, East SL is in Illinois...

Maybe I am just too much of a purist, but I was distracted from enjoying this book. He has done a better job on the others, imho.

Larry Karp's The King of Ragtime takes on the double challenge of fictionalizing real historical figures and capturing their time and place with authority. Karp meets both challenges fully, and then hands us a crackling good murder mystery. As a reader who knows more than a little about the book's leading characters, Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin, I thought I'd find myself merely caught up with the author's portrayal of these men. Wrong. It's a murder mystery. Before long he had me exactly where he wanted me: "Who Done It?"

Max Morath

I've just finished re-reading Larry Karp's The King Of Ragtime, second in his "Ragtime Mysteries" series, and it's a wonderful sequel to The Ragtime Kid. Like its predecessor, it's a mixture of real historical characters and some fictional folks, and similarly, it's a photograph of the Ragtime era, with its hustle and bustle, and casual racial and religious bias.
The book takes place in the summer of 1916, in New York City, and it moves between Harlem and Manhattan, where rival composers Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin live and interact. The characters, both real and imagined, are nicely realized, and there's at least one surprise personality in the mix. We meet Berlin's partners, and his office staff, and Joplin's wife, Lottie, and his old friends from Sedalia, John and Eleanor Stark, now Eleanor Stanley. We get a feel for the Harlem scene, and the subway, and summer in New York City, as the characters move through the heat and sounds and smells of the city, and through the immensity of Penn Station. The research is impeccable, but always transparent.
As in The Ragtime Kid, there's a black world and a white world, and they intersect here in Tin Pan Alley, the hub of popular American music. Joplin is now near the end of his life; suffering from dementia and paranoia, he's possessed by the need to complete two musical compositions. Berlin, on the other hand, is riding the popularity train, and equally bent on composing the music for a Ziegfeld musical review, and furthering his own career. Murder intervenes, however, and Joplin will be blamed if his friends don't find the real culprit.
So they spirit him away, and his friends from the previous book are joined by a present friend and pupil and his friends, and justice is accomplished. There's lots of papers along the way: Joplin's musical compositions, and some evidence of financial wrong-doing within Berlin's music agency, and even some fake documents to get a witness out of the office. And there's kidnapping, and violence, and impersonation, and young love, and a moving conclusion--all the stuff of opera, in fact.
Another, equally absorbing, puzzle overlies the book. Joplin's composition in progress, "If," compares the events of his own life to an alternate, hoped-for life. This book does something similar, posing the perennial author's question, "what if," and examining what might transpire when two men vie for the same musical crown while those about them merely pursue the almighty dollar. The parallels between Joplin and Berlin, two men possessed by their work, are many; small of stature but large of talent, they rage, they threaten, they trust no one, and they are "music-writing machine(s)." So is one of them truly the king of ragtime? Read this book, then read the author's "Last Word," and then listen to the music--and decide for yourself.

Finally, a sequel to The Ragtime Kid and one that does the groundbreaking Kid more than a little justice. The King of Ragtime follows ragtime's king, Scott Joplin, from Sedalia, Missouri to the end of the line, New York City's Harlem of 1916, a time when Joplin, addled and dying, is still writing his extraordinary music. Joplin, in fact, is a man possessed, a man who remains sane enough to be ambitious for his rightful place in the musical pantheon. But also determined to make his mark in the very same way is a now-famous songwriter named Irving Berlin, and Berlin seems unscrupulous enough to... But wait, you'll have to read Larry Karp's meticulously researched and clever mystery to find out.

The question here isn't who wrote "Alexander's Ragtime Band" (although that's a controversy still alive today), but who killed the young man found stabbed to death in the offices of Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder Music Publishers--with Joplin himself crouched over the bloody body.

This juicy puzzler has a lot going on--characters both black and white interacting in a day and age when racial justice wasn't even a question on most people's minds--young lovers confronted by disapprving parents--gun toting mobsters--a Civil War incident never forgotten, the music business of the day, and not least the little matter of catching a killer.

Consider the book a highly recommended read, rife with history, intrigue, and characters that ring true-to-life complex. This latest novel is another example of Karp's multi-layered literary talents and personal devotion to the world of song.

Despite two murders, this is not a traditional mystery, and even though it perfectly recreates 1916 New York, it's much more than a historical novel. The story is intricately plotted with colorful characters, including historical figures, who leap to life intent on surprising us. Karp entertains with complex relationships and taut suspense, even as he educates us about the music and mores of the ragtime era.

In 1916 in Manhattan a dying Scott Joplin knows he is running out of time to insure his wife Lottie is financially set and to gain his place in the music pantheon. It deeply disturbs him that he believes Irving Berlin cheated him from credit for some work stolen from him; still he has written a musical that he hopes Waterson, Berlin, and Snyder Music Publishers will want to use. Piano student Martin Niederhoffer offers to bring the two men together as he takes lessons from Joplin and works for Berlin.

The meeting proves futile as Joplin accuses Berlin of stealing his work. Soon afterward Martin finds Joplin holding a straight razor while standing over the murdered body of Martin's peer Sid Altman.. Joplin claims his innocence and Martin needs to believe him. Nell Stanley, daughter of a former Joplin publisher, hides him while the cops want him for questioning. Martin hires hit man Footsie Vinny to pressure Berlin into giving up the musical play Joplin says he left with him, but Berlin denies it. Things turn uglier when thugs kidnap Martin's girlfriend.

The second Joplin historical mystery (see THE RAGTIME KID) is a fascinating look at the Manhattan music world during WWI. The story line is a bit loose, but readers will enjoy the wild ride anyway as real figures like Joplin and Berlin come to life beyond the legend. The amateur sleuthing is fun to follow but it is the obsessed with insuring for Lottie's future and how history recalls him Joplin who turns this whodunit into a concerto performance.

Harriet Klausner