THE GIRL IN THE GREEN DRESS

A retrospective look at the death of real-life journalist Morris Markey.

Fredericks takes a cue from Markey’s own words—“It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward.” Beginning with Markey’s corpse sprawled in the front hallway of his home in Halifax, Virginia, she scrolls back 30 years to 1920, where the 21-year-old Markey, fresh from serving with the Red Cross on the front lines of the First World War, is looking to make a name for himself writing for the New York Daily News. In real life, Markey investigated solo, but Fredericks gives her fictionalized reporter a pair of co-sleuths: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. These icons of the Jazz Age give the story its heartbeat. As Markey searches for a mysterious, strikingly beautiful young woman in a dollar-green dress he sees briefly outside Joseph Elwell’s home the night before the playboy’s murder, the Fitzgeralds take the young reporter under their wing, escorting him to high-octane parties and super-swank clubs, drinking up a storm, and generally raising hell. Markey’s intense but platonic relationship with Zelda is particularly compelling: Fredericks’ Zelda all but dances off the page. But when it returns to the 1950s, Fredericks’ narrative fails to fulfill the mission Markey teases. Looking backward gives a vivid picture of the Markey Fredericks imagines in his whirlwind tangle with the Fitzgeralds, but this retrospective excursion sheds scant light on how 30 years later he came to be lying cold and still in his front hallway.

It’s all fun and games until the music stops.