The Black Bottom: The Measure Of Man

The BLACK BOTTOM has harvested 5 major awards including: 2021: 1st Place Clue Awards: The Chanticleer Clue Award is named for Best in Suspense/Thriller Fiction Book of the Year. 2020: 1ST Place The Next Generation Indie Book Awards: The Largest International Book Awards For Indie Authors and Publishers Best In General Fiction / Psychological Thriller About The Black Bottom: The Black Bottom was a neighborhood that served as ground zero for Detroit's contribution to jazz. Every major industrialized city had them. The speakeasies, the blind pigs, the honky-tonks that were the testing grounds and launching pad of America's greatest of art form; jazz. It was in these back-alley, late night gathering holes that musicians banded for the voyaging of jazz while it was vaudeville that dispersed the craze across America. This was jazz in its adolescence. The raw, untamed, devil-may-care youth of jazz. The title, The Black Bottom, harkens back to an earlier time in Detroit's history when the city was an agricultural community and this low basin was legendary for its rich, black soil. There is poetic beauty to this area transitioning from the cultivation of agriculture to the cultivation of music-culture. Today the neighborhood of The Black Bottom is buried under thousands of tons I 375 freeway. But the voices of the people entombed there, and the music they generated, call out from beneath the stone. THE BLACK BOTTOM: The Measure Of Man is what they have to say. About the novel: THE BLACK BOTTOM, The Measure of Man, is a Novel Noir psychological thriller set in the roar of a 1927 Detroit. In the America of the 1920's, jazz was smack dab in its formative years, distending the edges of the musical landscape. Kaleb Kierka is a man without memory. Locked in the grip of amnesia as a result of a violent beating, he must quickly learn his history or become a victim to it. Kaleb's narration unfolds of a young man who is at once an owner of an underground speakeasy, a Purple Gang affiliate, and a piano player in the seedier speakeasies of Detroit. Kaleb will need to recover his history quickly if he is to have any hope of avoiding his demise. The narration follows Kaleb as he negotiates the roar of the 20s. But time is short for Kaleb to recover his memory as violence follows him like a dark shadow; a silhouetted memory of a violent chronicle. Jazz, amnesia, the Roaring Twenties, prohibition, gang wars, union wars and 1927 Detroit are all explored in this psychological thriller.