Top Ten Prohibition-Era Books
by Katharine Schellman
Prohibition looms large in the American imagination as a time of flappers, gangsters, jazz music, and illegal liquor. Its cultural staying power is partly thanks to the literature of the era. The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Claud McKay, Nella Larson, and their contemporaries have been classics since they were first published in the 1920s.
But the Jazz Age wasn’t just inspiring for the writers who lived through it. In both fiction and non-fiction, authors continue to explore the glamor and grittiness that came to define the Roaring Twenties. If you’re in the mood for speakeasies, bootleggers, and facts that read like fiction, you’ll want to pick up one of these ten Prohibition-era books.
- Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
Technically, Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher Mysteries aren’t Prohibition novels, since they’re set in Australia, and Prohibition was an American phenomenon. But the heroine of these popular 1920s mysteries boldly embodies the idea of the New Woman that catapulted into mainstream culture during the Jazz Age: she dances, drinks, smokes, takes lovers, and charts her own course, far away from the protection of the family unit. And in Cocaine Blues, the first in the series, she tackles a seedy cocaine-smuggling ring that could give any Chicago mobster a run for his money.
- The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective by Susannah Stapleton
The 1920s gave rise to what is known in literary circles as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, when authors like Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley, and Dorothy L. Sayers began their prolific careers. Their work made “lady detectives” a staple of the mystery genre that has lasted into the modern day.
But female investigators weren’t just fictional. Susannah Stapleton’s biography of Maud West chronicles the career of a detective who worked in the first half of the 20th century and became the darling of the press, a real “lady detective” in the Golden Age of Crime. Stapleton’s investigation into Maud’s life often reads like a work of fiction, as unbelievable as one of the adventures of Miss Marple or Harriet Vane.
- Gods of Jade and Shadow
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Jazz Age was a time of rapid social change for women, many of whom left behind rural family units to pursue independent lives in growing cities. In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Jazz Age fantasy novel, Caseopia Tun dreams of joining them and living a glamorous, exciting life away from the confines of her grandfather’s home in southern Mexico.
She gets her wish when she accidentally frees the Mayan god of death, who wants to regain his throne. Their adventure takes them from the vivid, jazz-filled streets of Mexico City to the Mayan underworld, with the risk of failure and death following at every turn.
- The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
Valentine’s retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” also features young women who want to escape confined lives: twelve sisters who are kept as near-prisoners by a controlling father in Prohibition-era New York City. Valentine uses her Jazz Age fairy tale to explore at the illegal, underground world of bootleggers, speakeasies, and dance halls. There, the party might never end, but neither does the danger that comes with it.
- Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia
During the Prohibition era, New York City’s Harlem neighborhood became a hub of literature, music, politics, and art that celebrated and advanced Black culture in America. Harlem was also a hub of queer culture in the 1920s, with speakeasies welcoming same-sex couples and drag balls regularly reported on in newspapers.
Nekesa Afia’s Jazz Age mystery is set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. Protagonist Loiuse Lloyd wants to live a quiet life. But when young Black girls like her begin turning up dead in Harlem, Louise, along with her girlfriend Rosa, finds herself dragged into the hunt for a killer.
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
In another true story that feels like fiction, David Grann examines the series of murders that became the FBI’s first major homicide investigation.
In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were the richest people in the world after oil was discovered on their land. Then the Osage began mysteriously dying, along with anyone who got too curious about the deaths. The newly-formed FBI was called in to investigate but bungled the job until J. Edgar Hoover, the young director, took over the case with the help of one of the only Native American agents in the Bureau. Grann’s book may be non-fiction, but it feels like a modern-day thriller.
- Wild Woman and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce
During Prohibition, Chicago was known for mobsters and bootleggers like Al Capone, along with the infamous “bathtub gin” they made and sold. But Chicago was also the jazz capital of the world, a center of culture, film, and music, especially in the city’s Black neighborhoods.
In Denny S. Bryce’s dual-timeline novel, a modern-day film student dives into the Jazz Age life of Honoree Dalcour, a sharecropper’s daughter hoping to dance her way to the top, and her mysterious ties to the legendary (and real-life) film director Oscar Micheaux.
- The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
For many people, especially those who read it in high school or college, The Great Gatsby in synonymous with both the glamor and the ugliness of the Prohibition era.
Nghi Vo’s fantasy retelling of Fitzgerald’s classic reimagines Jordan Baker at the center of the story. She’s still a golf pro moving through elite circles; she’s also a queer Vietnamese adoptee who is treated like an exotic curiosity by the people around her. In this version of Gatsby, the glamor and ugliness aren’t just thematic; they become personified in the magic, illusions, and ghosts that Jordan encounters while she fights for a place in her world.
- Jazz Moon by Joe Okonkwo
After World War I, Paris became an enclave of artists, home to writers and artists like Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, and Sylvia Beach. But while bohemian Paris was full of inspiration, it also was grounded in the heartache and trauma of the post-World War I generation.
In Joe Okonkwo’s Jazz Moon, a poet and a trumpet player meet on a hot summer day in Harlem and, after striking up a friendship, decide to join the many Black artists moving to Paris. They’re hoping to escape the pervasive racism of their home country, but they find that the Jazz Age can be as decadent, seedy, and bittersweet in Paris as it is in New York City.
- The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
During Prohibition, the Tammany Hall political machine ran New York through a system of bribes, favors, and outright corruption. Their control extended to the coroner’s office—until their appointee became so embroiled in scandal that even they couldn’t keep him in power. His replacement was Charles Norris, one of the pioneers of forensic medicine.
Blum’s account of Norris and his colleagues is set against the proliferation of easily accessible poisons in the Jazz Age, from arsenic to chloroform. It reads like science fiction, examining both poisoning crimes and the many bizarre ways that scientists solved them—including, sometimes, dosing themselves with the poisons they were learning to detect. With its litany of famous, infamous, and often baffling murders, it touches on the life and experience of nearly every social, ethnic, and racial group that lived (or sometimes, didn’t live) through New York City’s Jazz Age.
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Katharine Schellman writes historical mysteries filled with intricate plots and smart, gutsy sleuths. Her newest series, set in Jazz Age NYC, launched in 2022 with Last Call at the Nightingale, a gritty, glamorous mystery that was a New York Times editors’ pick for June and named one of the best mysteries of the summer by Publisher’s Weekly, Goodreads, Bustle, and more. Her most recent release is The Last Drop of Hemlock. You can learn more about Katharine’s work at www.KatharineSchellman.com.