"The Wicked Redhead" by Beatriz Williams

Sydney M. Williams

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Burrowing into Books

“The Wicked Redhead” by Beatriz Williams

December x, 2019

“I don’t hold with wallowing in past afflictions;

I like to walk into my future looking square ahead.”

                                                                                    Geneva Kelly (the “Wicked Redhead”)

                                                                                    The Wicked Redhead, 2019

                                                                                    Beatriz Williams

This is the second of two Beatriz Williams’ novels dealing with prohibition. The first, The Wicked City, was published in 2017. Both Geneva “Gin” Kelly, the quick-witted flapper from the hills of western Maryland and Ella Gilbert (née Dommerich), the 1990s New York socialite whose adulterous husband’s extracurricular activities include hook-ups with hookers, are linked through the Greenwich Village apartment in which one lived and the other now lives – seventy-four years apart.

Apart from a display of animal spirits between Ella (who had recently caught her husband in flagrante delicto with a prostitute in the stairwell of their apartment) and her friend Hector, early in the story – a scene that threatened to send me into cardiac arrest – this is a great adventure tale.

Like me, but better read and more knowledgeable, Beatriz is a fan of Anthony Trollope. Characters who appear in one book have a habit of popping up in another, usually in lesser or greater roles. An example is the Schuyler family, first encountered six years ago in her second novel A Hundred Summers. The recurrence of familiar names makes reading her books a family affair   

As well, Beatriz takes the opportunity to provide the reader a serious and sensitive discussion on abortion. Ella, who has just left her cheating husband, is speaking to her Dad: “Until now, I’ve had the luxury of assuming I would never have to decide something like this. Abortions were for girls who weren’t careful. Which was a stupid way of thinking about it, I know…I don’t know what to do. Either way, it’s going to suck, and I have to decide now. Like now.”

It is, however, Gin Kelly that dominates this story. She is a beautiful, out-spoken, independent young woman who was brought up in the hills of western Maryland by a brutal but entrepreneurial and successful bootlegger father. She now lives the life of a flapper in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1920s. The story begins in Cocoa Beach, Florida, where she fled with the (wrongly) disgraced Prohibition agent, Oliver Anson Marshall, the man she loves. Marshall returns to New York, where he is reinstated into the Agency and his reputation restored.  Gin follows him north: “…it ain’t enough to stop a redheaded hillbilly reared up inside the holler betwixt two Maryland mountains.”

In this book, she provides an historical lookback on Prohibition, especially about the wholesalers who lined the east coast of the United States just outside its territorial sovereignty of three miles, and the rumrunners in small crafts who brought the booze into darkened ports and hidden docks. We read of the risks they ran and of the danger faced by federal agents charged with their capture. Prohibition never stopped people from drinking, but it did offer fortunes to those willing to take risks. We read of flappers, society women like Julie Schuyler, who found, in the post-World War I environment, late nights, jazz, sexual freedom and speakeasies, where women could drink and smoke as equals with men. Like all of her novels, this story builds to an exciting denouement, where all the myriad strands are drawn together in one final climax.

Nevertheless, we are left hanging, wanting more, with some unanswered questions that I will not list, but which suggest that a third volume in this series is planned – a prospect that should please all fans of Ginger Kelly, the, in fact, not-so-wicked redhead.