Madame Queen: The Life and Crimes of Harlem’s Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair

In this evocative account, true crime writer McBrayer (America’s First Female Serial Killer) artfully fills in the gaps in the record of the life of Stephanie St. Clair, a notorious racketeer in 1920s and ’30s Harlem. Born in the West Indies in the late 1880s, St. Clair traveled to New York City alone at age 13 and used her immense talent for numbers and probabilities to build a highly respected yet illegal lottery. Details of her life are scant, as St. Clair preferred to avoid the public eye—that is, until a law enforcement plot to frame her drove her to purchase ad space in a local paper to call out police corruption. The positive response from Harlemites led to St. Clair regularly making her public comments via advertisement, raising her profile as a community leader. The author uses the sparse facts of her subject’s life as the basis for a dramatic retelling, replete with recreated dialogue, period-appropriate details, and speculation on St. Clair’s motivations. (Justifying her creative approach, McBrayer says, “Stephanie made her living off probabilities, so I feel comfortable taking this gamble.”) In McBrayer’s telling, St. Clair was a remarkably bright, determined, and scrupulous businesswoman whose under-the-table dealings set her on a collision course with a cast of colorful figures. The result is a vivid reanimation of 20th-century Harlem and an immersive organized crime saga. (June)