Redemption [Hardcover]

Frederick Turner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

Francis Muldoon is a special policeman in the notorious Storyville District of New Orleans in 1913. His job is to see that the District’s volatile mixture of sex, alcohol, and gambling doesn’t boil over but instead rolls along at a continuous simmer. Once a member of the city’s regular police force, he now works for the District’s vice lord, Tom Anderson, patrolling his patron’s honky-tonks and saloons and whorehouses—both the high-priced bordellos and the coffinlike cribs where the girls work with only a cot and a washbasin.  When Adele, a beautiful singer at the Tuxedo dance hall, draws Francis into a contentious rivalry for her affection, a fatal shootout is the inevitable conclusion, sending the District into a scalding eruption and revealing the central characters for what they are.

Filled with the rich atmosphere of America’s most colorful city, Redemption is the powerfully told tale of a man’s efforts to restore the integrity of his soul.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this second fictional outing (after eight nonfiction titles and 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age), Turner evokes the debauchery of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century with intoxicating period detail. The grip of longtime vice lord Tom Anderson on the Storyville District's diversions of booze, half-hour whores and high-class brothels is challenged by the arrival of the Parker brothers, whose gangster money and thug muscle have Anderson's crew looking over their shoulders. Francis "Fast-Mail" Muldoon, the lost-soul protagonist, was a champion runner as a boy (hence the nickname) and then a city cop, before he was crippled in a shooting and falsely accused of cowardice; now he's Anderson's "man about town." But he's reluctant to be drawn into the escalating turf war, and his loyalty to the man who gave him a job after he hit bottom shatters when he uncovers his boss's ongoing romance with a young saloon singer (the object of Muldoon's own stunted affections) whom Anderson had first taken as a lover when she was his teenaged stepdaughter. Fast-Mail's redemption in the bloody finale is the soul-warming center of this emotionally complex page-turner. Turner's sense of time and place—including a cameo by real-life prostitute photographer Bellocq—imbue the novel with atmosphere as steamy as a New Orleans summer day. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Following his smashing success in visiting the historical past in his lovely first novel, 1929 (2003), a riveting reconstruction of the life of jazz coronet player Bix Beiderbecke, Turner now embraces another historical figure with the same exuberance, knowledge of history, narrative talent, and stylistic verve. As the sun rises over the Storyville red-light neighborhood of New Orleans in the year 1913, Tom Anderson is the caudillo of the district. At his right hand sits Francis Muldoon, an ex-cop and now Tom's man "to keep things right" in the district's booze-and-broads business operations. A rival establishment has set up shop within Tom's fiefdom, and a singer there complicates the tense situation because she and Tom have a tricky past. This large predicament by necessity involves Francis, who, however, is fighting his own demons. The novel is centered on the issue of who has or does not have your back within a milieu in which almost anyone would just as soon knife you in the back. The authentic details from which Turner fashions this swiftly paced narrative perfectly conjure up the New Orleans atmosphere, which is at once peculiar in America and peculiarly American. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151014701
• ISBN-13: 978-0151014705
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #865,264 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Fightin's strickly for suckers. Remember that, why doncha.", November 5, 2006

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Redemption (Hardcover)

In atmospheric New Orleans' Storyville of 1913, Tom Anderson is the undisputed master, running the red-light district with an iron hand, masterfully manipulating those who do his bidding to get their piece of a very lucrative pie. From politics to vice, Anderson is the nerve center of the operation, hand-picking his men with a penchant for violence when necessary. Among Anderson's trusted cadre, Francis Muldoon serves various purposes, reporting on incidents as well as any usurpers on Anderson's turf. A mere shadow of his former self, a significant wound has slowed Muldoon's once formidable gait and given him a marked limp. Dealing with his own emotional problems, Francis works his night shifts, collecting crib keys as required. That is, until he runs across a beautiful young singer who is working for Anderson's competition, Muldoon indulging in fantasies that are unlikely to come true any time soon.

Muldoon is brought up short when he realizes that Anderson has a very personal interest in the songstress, a history that goes back to an unflattering and highly disturbing episode when she lived in Anderson's home as a child, her mother the big man's mistress. The singer, who currently calls herself Adele, is no passive observer; and given her past with Anderson, revenge may be a motivation in her endeavors. As issues and participants collide, Storyville is revealed in all its decadence, exploitation and greed. Dark forces are at work when control of the district is at stake, Muldoon and Adele caught in a maelstrom of violence and unexpected revelations, a conflict of epic proportions on the horizon. At the heart of Muldoon's awakening, no matter how convoluted the plot in delivering the coup d'grace, is that the women of the district are essentially damaged goods by the time they arrive, simply playing out the rest of lives already turned bad. Storyville has its own rules and happiness is never an option. It is this fact that Muldoon resists in his foolish affection for Adele.

Rather than the more benign historical perspective of Anderson as Storyville's wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, Turner's limping and ineffective Muldoon has reason for cynicism: "It had occurred to him... that he worked among dead people, and that the district itself was a kind of giant charnel house, bordered by its formal cemeteries." Indeed, Anderson is the evil architect, building his success upon the broken backs of others, discarded when their usefulness is over. Storyville is not the brilliant, laughter and alcohol-fueled celebration of wine, women and jazz, but rather the dregs of humanity shuffling slowly to their uniquely macabre dance, the tune played by one man, impervious to anything but his own greed. Muldoon's moment comes at the cost of his illusions, his only option to flee from that which would only destroy him. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

3.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Period Piece and Story With Too Much Left Unresolved, October 21, 2009

By 

J. P. Richardson "esqret" (Newfane, VT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Redemption (Hardcover)

Frederick Turner is a wonderful writer. I read "Redemption" in two nights, and couldn't put it down. One does indeed feel a part of the time and place while reading "Redemption," and it is a remarkable historical entity one visits. I'm usually wary of a historical figure making an appearance in a novel, but even that is handled with grace and purpose here, and the novel (and Muldoon's process of self-discovery) profit from from Bellocq's cameo appearance.

But there is too much left up in the air here, and the ending is far from satisfying. A mystery concerning a deformed piano player--given much attention and many pages as the novel progresses--is never resolved. Actions by characters familiar to us immediately preceding the novel's bloody confrontation seem to be at odds with what has been carefully arranged. Why ex-policeman Muldoon was shamed as a coward after being maimed in a police action simply doesn't ring true. And the ending, apparently put in motion by the last thing the girl singer says to Muldoon, makes no sense whatever to me.

An often brilliant bit of story-telling and a wonderful slice of intriguing Americana, this. But such an effort should not leave the reader closing the book and wondering what has happened. I understand the themes in play here. I understand the progress of Muldoon's education and self-discovery. I was prepared for an ending that was, minimally, itself understandable. And I've tried, without success, to discover such an ending in what is given to us in the book's final pages.

To which I would only add that the review attacking "Redemption" as foul and obscene seems to me misdirected and foolish. The use of wording some may find personally offensive is never gratuitous here, and is always in character. The subject and the setting do not admit of an atmosphere suitable to "golly" and "gosh darn it." Characters in novels have a tendency to speak to each other. If you're offended by rough language, man, stay away from novels set in rough historical places.

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not even good pornography, January 31, 2007

By 

James A. Anderson (San Marino, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Redemption (Hardcover)

Mr. Turner looks to be a talented writer. He frames strong characters in flesh and blood and describes turn-of-the-century New Orleans picturesquely. One wonders why, then, with all of the vocabulary skills he clearly possesses he relies so heavily on tawdry language and depictions. This is a book I will not even donate to the library. Perhaps Mr. Turner should stick to non-fiction. Don't buy this book unless you have a depthless tolerance for four letter words and derivitives.