Review of "Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Story" (spoilery)

Underwood, Blair, and Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. Casanegra: A Tennyson Hardwick Story. New York: Atria Books, 2007.

African American film and television actor Blair Underwood’s "Casanegra" mystery novel--written with assistance from established authors Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes--is both fact and fiction, fearlessly defining what is by what it is not, resulting in a brutal, unflinching clarity about its people and their purposes.

It isn’t requested of lead character Tennyson Hardwick that he look into the murder of the famous and wealthy female rapper and actress Serena Johnston aka "Afrodite"--it becomes required when she was not only last seen in public with him just hours before her corpse, beaten and a little bloody, was found in a plastic bag on the streets, but also because the only item found on her body was Hardwick’s business card.

Hardwick’s life has been and still is complicated. The son of a cop, Hardwick went through the police academy himself--although he dropped out just two weeks prior to graduation. This was a blow to his heralded police captain father, helping lead to their current estrangement. Their relationship has been furthered hampered by the father’s presently being confined to long-term medical care due to a recent debilitating stroke.

At present, Hardwick’s an intermittently working actor in Hollywood, best known for having been on a popular TV series years ago, but before that, he trained and worked as an armed bodyguard, and was also a very successful male escort to Hollywood’s lonely top-tier actresses--with a clientele roster that at one time included Johnston.

The trail to Johnston’s killer is a likewise complicated one, taking Hardwick from Johnston’s childhood friend, now her lawyer and business partner, who, unaware of Hardwick’s other training and experiences, ridicules "gigolo" Hardwick’s efforts to find the killer, over to the thoughtless antics of Johnston’s drug addict lookalike half-sister, who almost gets Hardwick killed in a fiery shootout in her and Johnston’s long-abandoned apartment house in the desperate Baldwin Hills neighborhood--to say nothing of the loudmouth rapper who’s all too happy to brag in a noisy dance club full of people that he killed Johnston.

Meanwhile, rumors fly that a disgruntled movie producer had Johnston done in by his mob pals, as revenge for her quitting his film in the middle of shooting, costing him millions of dollars.
Hardwick teams up with Los Angeles Times newspaper reporter April Forrest--in whom he has more than just a passing romantic interest--as he travels the trail, in the meantime saving an underage prostitute, Chela, from his former madam; gaining the trust of another childhood friend of Johnston’s, now a cop, who manages to get word to Hardwick that he’s looking in the wrong place before ending up in the morgue as well; and laying the groundwork for a reconciliation with his father, who provides him with invaluable assistance and sources that lead him right to the real killer--who confesses and surrenders to the police.

"Casanegra" is a mystery novel that is dense with details and backstory, actions and motives, consequences and payback. The mood is electric, sexy and provocative, from Hardwick’s masterful lovemaking to Johnston in the book’s first few pages to the furious physical attacks and handgun threats in the book’s last few pages that leave Hardwick close to losing his life more then a few times in his quest to learn the truth.

There’s more than enough red herrings—Was Johnston killed by that rival rapper? By the mafia? By crooked cops? By her jealous half-sister?--and the killer’s identity is surprising yet makes perfect, sad sense.

If it’s too far-fetched to believe that the novel’s entire murder mystery plot plays out in a matter of days, not even a week, it can’t be ignored that some of the more tragic aspects of the story are drawn from real-life events. One of the novel’s keenest strengths is its sense of history and cultural responsibility.

The book may take its title from the name of Johnston’s production company, which is a color flip on the movie title, "Casablanca," a favorite old movie of her absentee father. But the novel is informed by more recent times--in particular, the last decade or so of Hollywood/Los Angeles history, especially in regards to African American entertainers. The murders of the fictional rapper Afrodite and of her childhood friend and rapper, Shareef, reflect the real-life unsolved murders of African American rappers Biggie Smalls/Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur in the 1990s. Corrupt police officers on the payroll of the loudmouth rapper, who work Hardwick over with fists, feet, and a crowbar, reflect the late 1990s Rampart scandal, in which police officers were found to be on a rap record company’s payroll and may have been responsible for, among other heinous criminal acts, killing Smalls. The loudmouth rapper invites comparisons to singer R. Kelly, for Hardwick remembers that a few years ago, "a video on the Internet turned up showing an underage girl in his bed," similar to Kelly’s present legal troubles.

Standing in contrast to the violence and criminal acts in the current celebrity culture is the comparatively peaceful celebrity past; there are several nods to African American entertainers from decades prior.

Hardwick’s home is a mansion that was willed to him by a former escort client, an actress, and he keeps her framed autographed movie posters on the walls where she originally hung them, including the ones for "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner" and "In the Heat of the Night." And Hardwick is livid when officers executing a search warrant on his home carelessly drop and break the "Raisin in the Sun" framed poster. These aren’t just meaningless memorabilia for him; he discloses that it was Sidney Poitier, the star of all three of these films, but especially Poitier and his performance in that particular film that made him want to become an actor (and here the blurring of fact and fiction are most apparent, for the novel’s dedication reads simply, "For Sidney").

Further, the mansion’s guest room has prints of Dorothy Dandridge on the wall. Visiting a favorite bookstore, Hardwick ruminates on hating to leave without buying anything and is usually "quick to pick up black DVDs: 1943’s Cabin in the Sky with Ethel Waters, Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson, Lena Horne, Butterfly McQueen, and Louis Armstrong; Carmen [Jones]… My father always said you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been."

Most pointedly, though, a "national civil rights leader" from New York, speaking at Johnston’s star-studded funeral, moves Hardwick with his words:

"A culture that eats its young is a culture that cannot survive," he said in a vibrato preacher’s voice. "What has happened to our young people? What has happened to our music? We’re so lucky nobody killed Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday. I praise God nobody gunned down Aretha, Diane, and Smokey. Stevie’s still with us. Amen. Prince wasn’t shot in a drive-by. We must, we must, we must, stop this violence in our music."

The story’s main strength is the main character, an exquisitely crafted African American male of intelligence, self-reliance, sexuality, and resourcefulness--and pathos. Hardwick consists of many layers; his personal history together with his awesome capabilities arguably make him more Everyman than Superman.

In the place of make-believe that is Hollywood and its movie and music industries, very few people are wearing their "real" faces, of which Hardwick’s own intensely commercial sexual past and troubling criminal history--including a past attempted murder charge, long since reduced and later expunged from his record, but which still completely shamed his father, as he was charged in his father’s old precinct--make him aware. But even he was unprepared for just how much Johnston had to overcome from her childhood--a childhood he comes to find out included sexual abuse, abortion, and prostitution, all by the age of 14--and how they come to figure into the reasons for her murder in adulthood. Hardwick’s prostitution came later in life, but his own sexual abuse came in his early teens also, when he was seduced by his junior high school drama teacher when he was 13, experiences he didn’t know they had in common.

The pursuit of Johnston’s killer forces Hardwick to confront, amongst all his other issues, his loneliness. He has a long list of former clients, both sexual and security, and plenty of acquaintances all over the city, but no real friends. He becomes obsessed with finding Johnston’s killer not so much because he’s the police’s number one suspect and needs to prove his innocence, but because his lovemaking session with Johnston wasn’t one of gigolo and client--no money exchanged hands--but one of a man and woman together out of mutual respect, empathy, and even affection. He didn’t know it at the time, but Johnston was beginning to come out from behind her mask and was reaching out for him, and he realizes that he was reaching out for her as well; he mourns not just her but also the chance he’s lost to learn to truly love her.

Realizing that he is capable of love and arguably worthy of love leads Hardwick to create the makeshift family that ends the novel. He takes his father out of the hated nursing home and brings him to live with him in the mansion--a place the father had never even visited before, refusing, because in his opinion, "the house was the result of ‘ill-gotten gains.’"

Obviously sensitive to the reflection of his own life--and Johnston’s--that 14-year-old prostitute Chela represents, he moves to take her out of the sex trade altogether--he brings her also to live in his home and he sets her up to attend the public high school in his neighborhood.

Chela and his father are a good influence on one another, and it especially helps that Chela can better understand the father’s stroke-slurred speech, after having tended to her dying grandmother (her only relative) before. Hardwick does have to set her straight, that he does not expect or want sex from her in return for his kindness, which had come to be the only language she understood from adult males--which is something he hopes to change.

Finally, he takes the first steps to opening himself up to April emotionally, not just sexually--a new language for him, too, in a way. "I hoped my heart hadn’t buried itself somewhere I wouldn’t find it again… But it was an extraordinary thought, enough to keep my spirit from drowning in the awfulness of Serena’s death: Am I ready for April? I might be…," he thinks to himself, before echoing the end of the end of the "Casablanca" film with "This might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."