[We present a review by Berkley Wendell Semple, Guyanese poet and novelist. Semple is the author of several books, including Lamplight Teller, for which he was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2004 First Book of Poetry category, and Flight and Other Poems, for which he won The Guyana Prize For Literature in 2022—Best Book of Poetry category.]
By Berkley Wendell Semple
[The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt, Michael Jordan, Georgetown, 2023. Winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature Best Book of Fiction, 2023.]
Michael Jordan’s wonderful new novel, The Girl in the Pink Pleated Skirt is a gripping tour de force of murder and police corruption set in Guyana (circa 1978 and 1992). The novel is in the mystery genre, but it is not a whodunit, it is more a why was the killer able to get away with it. Politics and cronyism play a part; bumbling police work plays a part; moral turpitude and a disregard for human life plays a part. The novel is more akin to Truman Capote’s, In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s, The Executioner’s Song in that it is an examination of crimes and criminals; it is not like anything by Agatha Christie or Mickey Spillane. This is a dark novel, full of bad, worse and worst guys engaged in very dastardly things, including the murder of women and children.
The novel wears the imprimatur of exposé, in the journalistic sense. It exposes the underbelly of Guyanese city life: the hierarchies of class, police brutality, and a citizenry’s frightening tolerance for abuse by authority figures. There is a prescience in the novel that is reflective of the past and present of Guyanese reality. The book has its impetus in a real murder case.