1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery was born on October 20th at 12:01 a.m., weighing in at 13.6 ounces and 9 inches tall.
The idea for this latest historical PI mystery came from a simple source. I have three kids living in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. I wanted to write a historical mystery, and setting it somewhere I visit often would let me research the novel during my free time when I sojourn there.
The next step was deciding when the story is set. The height of the Civil Rights Movement seemed like a captivating time period, so I chose 1955, one year after Brown v. Board of Education overturned the separate-but-equal doctrine and set the wheels in motion to end segregation in schools.
This demanded that the mysteries have this fight for equal rights at their core, as the backlash against this ruling was harsh, violent, and deep-seated, especially in the Deep South, which North Carolina bordered as part of the Upper South.
Thus, 1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery was conceived, nurtured, and born.
“Welcome to Antebellum,” the ghoul said. “You are the guest of honor.” Something isn’t right in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1955, and Jazz Jones will have to cut through the murk and set things straight.
“You heard about the dead boy?” She had said that her name was January Queen and that she was with the NAACP. Her eyes were a pair of sins, or maybe they just mirrored my own.
“Maybe we came to you,” she said, “because not only are you fair, but you have a firm grasp on what the word justice really means.”
And there it was, I thought. I was being asked to bring the killers to justice and expose the underbelly of seething hatred in my city, even if it meant offending my neighbors and inflaming the ire of otherwise good white folks who just didn’t know any better. And, possibly, break the law along the way. Whatever it took. Even if I had to dig some six-foot-deep holes along the way.
Jazz Jones is a white private investigator in Raleigh, raised by his aunt and her partner, a Black man, after his parents leave him there to return to the jazz circuit. This places him firmly in a no-man’s-land between white and Black at a volatile period in our nation’s history, a time when racial equality is tearing many communities apart.
January Queen is a Black representative of the NAACP sent down from New York City to investigate the lynching of a young Black man in Raleigh, which also happens to be the city in which she was born and raised. She hires Jazz to dig into the seamy elements behind the murder, and they uncover an entire bed of snakes, thrusting them into not only a fight for what is right, but a fight for their very lives.
Please join me in perusing the pages of a time in our country’s history when bad things happened, but good people fought back.
About the Author
Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014, he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.
Cost has published twenty books, mostly crime novels, from traditional PI to thriller to historical mystery. His most recent book debuts a new series: 1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery.
Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. Cost now spends his days writing at the computer.
