“HUDSON LAKE is a blend of fact and fiction set during the summer of 1926 in the New Carlisle, Indiana resort town where the Jean Goldkette Orchestra was the house band for the season.

The Blue Lantern Inn was leased by jazz orchestra leader Jean Goldkette in May 1926 as a showcase for his most talented musicians, including Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer, Doc Ryker and Pee Wee Russell. The Lantern drew visitors from throughout the region, especially on weekends when crowds from Chicago came up on the South Shore interurban line to hear the band.

HUDSON LAKE looks at how Bix Beiderbecke, cornetist with the band, influenced the lives of several characters whose paths cross his over the course of the summer, and speculates on how he reached a turning point in his own life and career.”

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click on image to see the full size "Hudson Lake" cover
P R E L U D E

June 1926
Hudson Lake Resort
New Carlisle, Indiana

Her name was Joy. It was an assumed name and an assumed attitude, because Joy wasn’t something she always felt, or at least something she hadn’t felt in years.

Once she was called it, she lived it - with her brassy bobbed red hair, wide rouged mouth and raucous laugh, the laugh that echoed all the way across the lake from her room on the third floor of the Hotel Hudson. You could hear her all hours of the day, with her wind-up portable phonograph and that laugh.

Every day that June, in the heat of the late morning, Joy would come downstairs in a bathing suit and robe and high-heeled slippers. She’d cross the road to the lake, go down to the pebbly shallows at the edge and stick her feet in, splaying her toes with their crimson-painted nails so that the distorted image of her foot beneath the clear water looked like a squat, white starfish. She’d ease in up to her waist, squealing at the cold, the water dyeing the bottom half of her red wool bathing suit a dark maroon. And then she’d wade back to shore, light a cigarette, and crunch back along the gravel path to the little yellow cottage in the field behind the hotel, the one where the single musicians lived.

At dusk, when the dwindling sunlight dyed the lake the color of Joy’s bathing suit, the little yellow cottage and the other cottages along the shore began to stir. Lights came on; swatches of music, muffled conversation and laughter floated out across the water; screen doors squeaked open and closed on rusty hinges like a badly tuned violin section. Once it was dark, Joy would emerge from the little yellow cottage, crooning some hot jazz song in a quavery, mournful contralto, cigarette tip glowing in the twilight, and stagger back to the hotel.

Back in Chicago some ninety miles away, streets intersected at uncompromising right angles, a glowing grid outlined by rows of streetlights connected like a string of pearls, and lines of autos headed down the lakefront in a serpentine dance from the north to the south, from the east at the beaches and the frenetic glow of State Street to the darkened bungalows to the west.

People went to sleep or came awake in hordes, headed to the elegant downtown cafes and hotels for a dose of the businessman’s bounce, the sweet stuff, all oozing saxes and European arrangements, played by respectable white men reading music from charts - Isham Jones at the College Inn, Fred Travers and His Orchestra at the bepalmed Terrace Garden in the Morrison Hotel.

Or they’d pass the Loop and keep going South to the black-and-tans, joints with peeling paint and mismatched chairs, where the music ran to hot trumpet and low-down gutbucket as purveyed by King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, all sleek and citified in dull black tuxedos and stiff wing collars. All over town, from the swanky hotels to the lowest dives, the dance floors were a crush of sweating and scented men and women, pressed against each other under layers of blue serge and beaded chiffon, spurred on and on by the music and the bootleg gin until the joints closed at two, at three, at dawn, or when the dancers dropped.

But at Hudson Lake, with frogs thrumming along the shore and a solitary duck on its black, glassy surface, it was usually quiet enough to hear Joy humming her sad song in the twilight - at least until eight p.m. every night except Mondays, when the Jean Goldkette Orchestra, led by Frankie Trumbauer and featuring Bix Beiderbecke on cornet, hit the bandstand of the dance hall across the road.

And the music they played wasn’t the businessman’s bounce, wasn’t the gut-bucket of the South Side, but something else; something that drew all those Chicago musicians down to hear them every Saturday and Sunday, something that made the most tone-deaf of the local Hoosiers cock their heads for an instant and listen as if a lover with the sweetest voice was calling them from a long distance away, something that made Joy smile up in her room at the Hotel Hudson, thinking about how the notes flowed slow and golden like honey down from the bell of a horn and slid enticingly into the whorled pink cochlea of her ears, tickling as they went, as she lay on the saggy-mattressed bed and watched the ceiling fan revolve above her head, singing her own sweet songs.

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For a day spent tucked in the shade of an oak tree at a small, quiet lakeside beach, I recommend Hudson Lake by LaGrange, Illinois, writer Laura Mazzuca Toops (Twilight Times Books, 2007). It’s a good fit, because the action takes place at a resort on the shores of Hudson Lake in Indiana. It’s set during the height of Prohibition, when folks would take the South Shore from Chicago to New Carlisle just to dance at the Blue Lantern dance hall and imbibe in a little—or a lot of—illegal hooch. The wild, jazzy music was provided by the Jean Goldkette jazz band with Bix Beiderbecke and Pee Wee Russell. The hooch was courtesy of local entrepreneurs.

Toops creates a real sense of place and time with her luscious portrayal of the hope-filled lazy days of early summer. A season when everyone, especially IU coed Harriet Braun (summer help at the Hudson Lake Resort), eagerly anticipates the warmth of the sun on a winter-weary body, and when the promise of summer love is as powerful and heady as the scent of lilies of the valley. Harriet is a pre-med student who’s spending her first summer away from her conservative family and boyfriend in Indianapolis. Hudson Lake is her first glimpse of a world where girlish virtue is only prized as a trophy, a notch on some stud’s belt. Against a backdrop of hot music (you can almost hear it), there’s first love with a “dangerous man,” loose women, and conflict between Al Capone’s henchmen, the KKK and local bootleggers.
 – Donna M. Chavez
Shore Magazine
Beach Reads
Sunday, June 17, 2007


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Rating 4/5
“At the height of prohibition the Hudson Lake Resort in New Carlisle, Indiana was a happening place, especially because the Jean Goldkette jazz band had been booked for the summer. Over the course of the gig thousands would board the South Shore train from Chicago to dance to this exciting new music. After all, Goldkette had brought some of the era’s best talent with him. Names like Pee Wee Russell and Bix Beiderbecke that would become the gold standard in American music history. By day the band slept (well, mostly) in cottages at the resort. By night they stirred up a thunderstorm of hot jazz, rattling the walls of the resort’s Blue Lantern dance hall. Then, from closing time til dawn, they drank bootleg hooch, smoked pot and schmoozed pretty girls. In particular, the sweet, if naive, Indiana University coed, Harriet Braun, and the world-weary woman-of-easy-virtue, Joy, both fell for the troubled, haunting young Beiderbecke. For Harriet he represented danger. For Joy, Bix’s appeal was in his no-questions-asked attitude. Everyone acted like they were inventing the 20th Century. As summer droned on, life at Hudson Lake became complicated by feuds between Al Capone’s henchmen, eager to take over bootleg operations and the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Ultimately reality seeped through the thin veneer of loud music, good times and illegal booze. For La Grange resident and COD fiction writing instructor Toops, her debut novel is a humdinger. ”
 –  Donna Chavez
The Naperville Glancer


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Toops has an obvious affection for her subject, which is hard to resist, and a deep knowledge of the time period. She skillfully brings the 1920s to life with the right historical touches without overburdening the reader with too many extraneous facts. That’s a difficult balancing act for many historical fiction writers, but Toops pulls it off. Hudson Lake is a fun, sexy Jazz Age story about a summer that changes the lives of everyone at Hudson Lake, and it just might be a great book to help keep you warm on these increasingly chilly days.
 –  Alice Maggio
The Gapers Block Book Club


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In the summer of 1926, the Jean Goldkette jazz band, led by sax player Frankie Trumbauer and featuring 23-year-old cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, landed a season-long gig at the Blue Lantern dance hall on Hudson Lake in rural Indiana. The culture clash that resulted between the gin-swilling band members and the stuffy townspeople, fueled by Indiana Klansmen on one hand and Chicago gangsters on the other, is the subject of Toops’ evocative jazz-age novel. At the center of the tale is the mercurial Beiderbecke, whose star shone brightly but briefly in the jazz world. Like Frederick Turner in his fictional ode to Bix, 1929 (2003), Toops portrays the troubled yet brilliant horn player as torn between his devotion to music and his guilt over disappointing his straitlaced parents. Added to the mix here is a fictional romance between Bix and a college student. The romantic element drifts too close to melodrama, but Topps’ ability to capture the intoxicating mix of energy and danger that defined the early days of jazz makes the novel required reading for anyone caught up in the enduring Bix legend.
 –  Bill Ott
Booklist


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It’s the 1920’s in Indiana, during the throes of Prohibition. Jazz music is king, and “the notes oozed from the bell of a horn, viscous and golden as honey.” Hudson Lake has its own little resort, a short distance from Chicago. Most of the time, it’s a quiet, country-style place. On summer weekends, however, soul-stirring music pumps through a world filled with secrets, bootlegged liquor, the KKK, and the long arm of the mobster, Al Capone.

Joy is desperate to immerse herself in pleasure. It’s her only chance to run from her past. Harriet Braun, the college girl doing summer work, eyes the scene with an analytical eye. Yet somehow, both are enthralled by a Bix Beiderbecke, a horn-man whose musical genius is sabotaged by his drunken despair. Fighting their own demons, the trio swirls together and apart. Each seems bent on self-destruction while yearning for salvation.

Ms. Toops’ descriptive writing is both mystical and compelling. A quote from her book sums up its own style: “ . . . a frantic narrative that ratcheted on like a stripped-down jalopy.” Time and again, I was swept away by her rhythmic prose. I found myself murmuring phrases to myself, each phrase capturing a mood perfectly.

Hudson Lake is excellent writing. The characters are fascinating, and well drawn. However, the story can wear on the spirit, as it is one of almost unrelieved melancholy. Every moment of sweetness has its bitterness; every moment of pleasure has a sense of doom attached. I read this book in short spurts, interspersed by other tales–– but I always returned to Hudson Lake. Ms. Toops has a profound gift for winding an atmosphere in, around, and through every moment of her book.
 – Reviewed by Jeanette Cottrell,
for eBook Reviews Weekly.


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With her third novel, Toops fully steeps readers in the frenetic, heady atmosphere of the Prohibition-era jazz experience. During the long, hot summer of 1926, Harriet Braun, an aspiring medical student on break from Indiana University, takes a job at a hotel adjacent to the Blue Lantern dance hall on Hudson Lake in rural New Carlisle, Indiana. The Jean Goldkette band headlines at this resort some seventy miles east of Chicago, and its cornet player, 23-year-old Bix Beiderbecke, frequently steals the show. The lives of Harriet and Bix intertwine with numerous other well-developed characters, nearly all of whom are masking personal pain. Things heat up further when Chicago mobsters and local Klan adherents enter the picture; a poignant romantic subplot turns things up a notch as well.

Although the pacing’s swift from the get-go, giving the novel a dazzling, almost kaleidoscopic feel, the numerous plot threads don’t fully coalesce until about halfway through. But even though the story gives little indication where it’s going early on, it’s impossible not to enjoy the ride. The enigmatic Beiderbecke, haunted by incidents from his past yet driven by his passion for music, is a brilliantly developed and compelling personality. The novel’s prose, peppered throughout with period slang and moonshine-laced attitude, conveys the historical period remarkably well. Highly recommended for those interested taking in a step back in time to the tumultuous and fascinating 1920s.
 – Sarah Johnson
Historical Novels Review Online
(scroll to the bottom of the page to see the review)


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It’s the summer of 1926 and Indiana University coed Harriet Braun has a summer job at a Hudson Lake, Indiana resort that’s adjacent to the Blue Lantern dance hall where Bix Beiderbecke and his jazz band are booked for the whole season. Harriet and Bix fall in love, the local KKK confronts Al Capone’s Chicago mob and bootleg hootch flows like water.

Rating: 4.5 = This book is either very clever, highly creative or brings new information to the table. I’m recommending it to my friends.
 – Donna
Monday Night Book Club


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. . . “Hudson Lake,” describes a time of gangsters, the “Klan,” local corrupt officials, and young and restless people looking for a wild night out on the town. They came to Hudson Lake to party and hear good jazz. Chicago crowds, via the South Shore Railroad descended on the Blue Lantern, despite the objections of the local “rubes” that disapproved of their behavior but liked their money. Toops’ also points out that while mob influences might have been bad for the area, local boot legging flourished under the guise of most authorities.

. . . Author Toops quickly establishes the main characters in the life of Bix Beiderbecke, including the two women who loved him, his colorful band members and the importance of the music that brought them all together to this tiny enclave of entertainment in Northern Indiana in 1926. Some might be disillusioned by the amount of sex and drinking described in the book that went on then, but this apparently was characteristic of many early performers who were destroyed by the vices that cut short their careers. The long list includes the likes of be bop sax man Charlie Parker who succumbed at age 33.

. . . Unlike many works, “Hudson Lake,” summarizes and brings to a conclusion what happened to its characters including the sad epilogue of one of music’s great performers. The book is a good read and promises a probable account of the times and tunes of this early jazz era.
 –  Reviewed by John Russell Ghrist,
the host of Midwest Ballroom, a Saturday radio program heard on WDCB 90.9 FM and worldwide on the Internet at  www.wdcb.org from 5-7 pm.

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