Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney Boylan
On a hot August day in 1980, a group of college friends descend upon the ghostly ruins of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, America’s first modern prison opened in 1829 and allowed to fall into disrepair by the 1970s. They are there on a bit of a lark and before the end of the evening they will be locked in and one of them will go missing, presumed dead. The repercussions of that night ripple through to the present day and will test the bonds of loyalty, love and identity.
That sounds like the premise of a great murder mystery novel. In fact, it is the premise of the new novel by Jennifer Finney Boylan in which she examines friendships forged by young people that are tested decades later. Who are we at that age, and what do we become? What do we owe to our old selves and our old lives and relationships?
In a recent conversation Boylan told me “I was thinking about a mystery novel with six characters who are locked in this incredibly creepy place, but I was also thinking about the years that follow in which each of them have failed in many ways to quite become the people they mean to be.”
An unsolved disappearance is, of course, fodder for many a murder mystery. But there isn’t just one disappearance. Another character disappears a few years later, believed dead too. Pretty soon we learn that that character, Quentin, is resurrected in the book as a transgender woman, Judith. When remains are found at Eastern State thirty-five years after that life changing summer night, one of the six friends is charged with murder and Judith is the only one who can provide an alibi, but should she? She has been harboring her own secrets and saving her old friend may well doom her own marriage and tear her family apart.
Yes, Jennifer Finney Boylan, one of the nation’s most prominent transgender writers, takes on gender transition and the challenges faced by someone in the age before Caitlyn Jenner.
Judith had to live what was described as a “stealth” life, faking death as a man and coming back as Judith with no history at all. She builds a life with a husband and stepson but the secret is kept even from them, despite the fact that her stepson is best friends with a transgender boy whose transition happened without too much stigma in their town.
Why was this part of the story? Boylan told me that it says something about America today “You can see one measure of how things have changed…. Being trans was so extraordinary she (Judith) had to hide it and no one knows.” Judith is, in fact, around the same age as author Boylan and as a writer who came out as trans in the early 90s Boylan is acutely aware of the pressure and challenge that carrying secrets had at a time when the world was unfamiliar with and more hostile to trans people.
But the book isn’t just about the different person that this one character becomes when she grows older. All of the friends who gathered at the prison ruin that night are not the same people in their fifties that they were at twenty and all have to reckon with decisions made that night that have followed them ever since.
The creepy, haunted environs of Eastern State Penitentiary serve as a great setting for a murder mystery but also a metaphor of course, of the prisons we keep ourselves in and Boylan is interested in finding out the lengths to which we will go to, to free ourselves from those prisons. “What does it mean to be haunted, to have ghosts in your life? Most of them are not the supernatural kind, most of them are the ghosts of yourself, of your younger self of a person who either you are finding it hard to live up to, the ideals that that person had or you are haunted by one bad decision that that person may have made that you’re still trying to unscramble.”
As a such a renowned thinker and commentator on transgender issues why did Boylan want to write a novel? “There are some truths that I think you can tell best in fiction” she told me. Indeed, many fans of the mystery genre will pick up this book because it fits so well into this popular genre. What they’ll find is a whole lot more than a who dunnit. They’ll find a book that explores the whole notion of “who am I?” too.
BEFORE YOU READ
Length: 289 pages
Genre: Mystery, Fiction,
Themes: identity, friendships, love, secrets
Commitment: engrossing mystery that makes you think
Support Indie bookstores and this site by buying here
