Quick Take
- Narration: Dion Graham brings early New Orleans to vivid, textured life, his control of dialect and atmosphere is a master class in historical fiction narration
- Themes: Jazz at the moment of its birth, racial identity in Creole New Orleans, the intersection of vice and art
- Mood: Atmospheric and immersive, laced with menace and music
- Verdict: A historical mystery that earns its setting, Storyville in 1907 is not a backdrop but the book’s true subject, and Dion Graham’s narration makes it breathe.
I found Chasing the Devil’s Tail at the bottom of a reading list I had assembled before a trip to New Orleans that I ended up canceling, the cities and books I had prepared for getting shuffled back into the queue for another year. I finally listened to it on a February evening when I had been wanting warm weather for weeks, the radiator ticking in the background, and David Fulmer’s Storyville arrived in Dion Graham’s voice like a genuine meteorological event. Within twenty minutes I had that particular sensation of place that only the best historical fiction and the best narration can produce together.
The novel is set in 1907 in Storyville, the legal red-light district of New Orleans where roughly two thousand prostitutes worked under the nominal governance of Tom Anderson, the political boss who ran the district like a private kingdom. Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr is investigating a series of murders, prostitutes killed and marked with a black rose, and his investigation moves him through a cast of historical figures that includes a young piano player who would become Jelly Roll Morton and Buddy Bolden, the cornet player widely credited with inventing jazz. The premise is rich and the execution, judging by the available reviews, justifies the ambition.
Storyville as the Novel’s Actual Subject
The murder plot in Chasing the Devil’s Tail is, in the conventional sense of a mystery, serviceable. Reviewer Patrick Scullin calls the book a time machine with pages, which points toward what Fulmer is actually doing: using the crime narrative as an entry point into a specific historical moment rather than as the primary dramatic engine. Storyville in 1907 was unlike anywhere else in America. Cocaine and opium were sold openly. A hundred shades of racial identity coexisted and collided in a city that did not sort neatly into the binary categories of the Jim Crow South. Jazz was not yet jazz, it was something being assembled in real time from multiple traditions, played in the bordellos and on the street corners of a district that existed precisely because the respectable city had decided to contain its appetites in one location.
Fulmer knows this world in the way that the best historical novelists know their settings: not as a collection of period details deployed for atmosphere but as a living system with its own logic and internal tensions. The presence of historical figures like Tom Anderson, Lulu White the district’s most notorious madam, Morton, and Bolden is handled with the care that distinguishes serious historical fiction from costume drama. These are not cameo appearances. They are structural elements of a world that Fulmer has reconstructed with genuine scholarship.
Valentin St. Cyr and the Creole Outsider
The choice to make the protagonist a Creole detective is not accidental. St. Cyr occupies a position in the racial and social geography of New Orleans that allows Fulmer to navigate multiple communities, Black, white, Creole, immigrant, without the simplifications that a protagonist more clearly placed on one side of the color line would impose. One reviewer notes the book’s vivid picture of the historical period, and much of that vividness comes from St. Cyr’s ability to move through Storyville’s layered world with the fluency of someone who belongs fully to none of its categories. The detective as liminal figure is a genre convention, but Fulmer grounds it in the specific historical reality of Creole New Orleans rather than treating it as a narrative convenience.
The black rose detail, each murder marked with the same symbol, gives the investigation its unifying thread without straining credulity, and the gradual revelation of motive and method feels earned rather than contrived. This is a first book in a series, and it establishes both the world and the detective with the confidence of someone who knows where the subsequent volumes are going.
Dion Graham and the Sound of Storyville
Dion Graham is one of the finest narrators working in the audiobook space, and his performance here is exceptional. He handles the multiple registers that Storyville requires, the formal speech of political figures like Tom Anderson, the street vernacular of the district’s working residents, the educated cadences of St. Cyr himself, with the naturalness of someone who has internalized the world rather than researched it. The atmospheric descriptions of the district’s physical presence, the music audible from the street, the specific texture of a city where beauty and violence occupied the same room, land with particular force in Graham’s voice. This is one of those audiobook pairings where the narrator does not merely deliver the text but actively deepens it.
At eleven hours, the pacing is steady without being rushed. The historical material never overwhelms the mystery, and the mystery never reduces the historical world to a backdrop. The balance is well-managed throughout.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
Listen if you are drawn to historical crime fiction that takes its setting seriously, if the birth of jazz in New Orleans is a subject you find intrinsically interesting, or if Dion Graham’s narration is reason enough on its own. It is, genuinely, that good.
Skip if you need a thriller that sustains mechanical tension rather than atmospheric immersion, or if historical fiction that integrates real figures alongside invented ones creates discomfort. The mystery resolves cleanly, but the experience is more about being in Storyville than solving the crime.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Chasing the Devil’s Tail the first book in a series, and do you need to read them in order?
Yes, this is the first book in the Valentin St. Cyr series. It is fully self-contained and needs no prior knowledge of subsequent volumes, but listeners who enjoy it will find several additional Storyville mysteries waiting with the same detective and setting.
How historically accurate is Fulmer’s portrayal of Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton?
Fulmer is careful with his historical figures, working within the documented record of the period. Buddy Bolden’s story, a musical genius who suffered a mental breakdown in 1907 and never recorded, is particularly well-handled, since so little is actually known about him that Fulmer has room to speculate responsibly.
Is this book appropriate for listeners who do not typically read crime fiction?
Yes. The crime plot is the structural frame but not the dominant experience. Listeners drawn by the jazz history, the New Orleans setting, or the Creole cultural context will find as much to engage with as readers who come for the detective story.
Does Dion Graham’s narration include any dialect or vocal characterization work, or is it straightforward reading?
Graham’s performance is fully characterized. He differentiates between the book’s varied social registers and historical figures with genuine vocal range. This is performance narration rather than simply reading the text aloud, and it is one of the primary reasons to choose the audio format for this particular book.
