Mariah Fredericks: The Girl in the Green Dress
I love the way Mariah Fredericks writes. Her prose sings. And if you are going to write about one of the greatest of all prose stylists, F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’ve got to have game yourself. While Scott and the lovely Zelda are not the main characters in this novel, they certainly inform it in every possible way. The main character is a much lesser-known writer of the time, Morris Markey. Markey, a friend of James Thurber’s and James M. Cain’s, wrote for The New Yorker and wrote extensively (for the purposes of this novel) about the still unsolved murder of James Elwell in 1920, a “swell” found shot through the head in his library. His house happens to be across the street from Markey’s and he is one of the last people to have seen him alive, very early the morning of his death.