When the final line is read and you find that it is difficult to extricate yourself from the world that swallowed you whole, you have found yourself a good novel. As George Saunders once said, good writing "enlivens that part of us that actually believes we are in this world, right now, and that being here somehow matters."
Writing duo Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray have accomplished just that with their latest historical novel, A Pair of Aces. Set in 1930s New York City, at the height of mob life, Benedict and Murray give us two women on opposite ends of the law who must join forces to bring down the head of the five largest crime families – Lucky Luciano.
Assistant District Attorney Eunice Carter, a character based on the real person, is the city's first Black prosecutor. Her work makes Black people throughout Harlem proud – and women everywhere take note of a Black woman front and center in the trial of the century. But as a woman who chooses to focus on her career in this era, Eunice Carter not only has to fight to hold her spot on the prosecutor's team among white male colleagues, she's also waging a battle at home against a husband who believes she should quit.
High-class brothel owner Polly Adler, also based on the real person, runs one of the best and safest brothels in New York City. Well-known names frequent "Polly's" for her booze, beauties, and bold persona. She, too, has women looking up to her – her "girls," she calls them – and she will do anything to protect their safety and financial well-being. She's always strived to be the best, even as she keeps that life hidden from her own family, which she supports with the very money the flesh trade brings in.
In the novel, both women are career-driven – and both women find their careers threatened the moment Lucky Luciano enters the picture.
The struggles women face, and the grip traditional gender roles hold over society, run deeply throughout the novel. Although Eunice – a middle-class Black woman – holds one of the most prominent roles in the city, those closest to her still push her toward lesser ambitions. She feels like she's being urged to shrink herself. At one point, even a friend questions whether her job is worth losing her husband. Polly, meanwhile, is a Jewish immigrant who worked her way up from poverty through sex work. She also learns to make herself pliable, contorting to the expectations of the men in her life and her trade, simply to survive.
Polly's immigrant story, though not central to the novel, illuminates what it means to arrive in the U.S. chasing the American Dream. How different is a young, poor, female migrant in the early 1900s from a young, poor, female migrant today?
Most of this novel is about power – who has it, who wields it best, and who can take it away. The women here fight for it at every turn: power over their careers, power over their bodies, and even for their seat at the table.
Benedict and Murray weave these familiar themes together, all stemming from women's enduring fight to simply exist in the world. But they have also vividly brought to life one of the most exciting literary and cultural moments in American history, and done so in a way readers from any background can enter without feeling like outsiders.
The beauty of this historical fiction is that it features appearances by a wide range of iconic people, from the Algonquin set to the Harlem Renaissance luminaries. It's rare to see the full spectrum of New York society held inside a single novel.
There are moments when the writers' possible convictions bleed too obviously through their characters' words – like when the usually confident Polly retreats into an internal monologue about being seen as immoral and an "exploiter of women," or when Eunice reflects on her plight as a Black woman freeing herself from being "bound by any chains."
A Pair of Aces is, nevertheless, a page-turner that celebrates what women can accomplish when they work together – regardless of background – for each other.
Keishel Williams is a Trinidadian American book reviewer, arts & culture writer, and editor.
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