Harlem Deadline

New York in the early Nineteen-Twenties is a city of immigrants—refugees from Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe, Jim Crow Dixie and the West Indies. Black Harlem is a pressure-cooker of differing cultures and social classes where artists and intellectuals are staging a renaissance of art, literature and militant politics, creating urban jazz, turning the Prohibition speakeasies of Harlem into an adult playground for the entire city.

Ray Bishop is a veteran of the World War I trenches and crime reporter for the weekly Harlem Gazette. When a wealthy black realtor is found murdered in a cabaret alley, the police blame it on his numbers runner, but Bishop’s skeptical stories draw the attention of the runner’s racketeer bosses--who claim it is a plot by white gangsters to frame them. Bishop’s former infantry C.O.--now NYPD Chief of Detectives—asks him to pursue the case unofficially with the help of a fellow veteran Assistant DA and Manhattan’s first black police sergeant. To the annoyance of New York’s only black plainclothes detective, Bishop begins to dig into the murdered realtor’s background, uncovering a complex web of hidden relationships and dark secrets behind the respectable mask of Harlem high society.