IRA MATHUR
Lisa Allen-Agostini, known for her genre-defying narratives, ventures into historical crime fiction with her latest work, Death in the Dry River (1000Volt Press, August 2024).
Notably, her novel The Bread the Devil Knead (Myriad Editions, 2021), was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, establishing her reputation as a compelling Caribbean storyteller.
Allen-Agostini’s literary journey began in childhood. In an interview with the Women’s Prize for Fiction, she shared her first foray into writing, recalling, “I was journalling since I was small—maybe six or seven?—but my first poem was written when I was eight or nine. It was awful and included the words’ the hills/and shining golden rills.’ Fortunately, I can’t remember much else about it.”
Her motivation to become a writer was equally innate. She explained, “I’ve always written, and from childhood, I knew I wanted to write professionally. It’s not so much ‘why did I become a writer’ as ‘how could I have not become a writer’ because it’s in my blood and bones. I love telling stories and writing poetry, sharing my ideas with other people and helping them see the world in a different way. I believe this is a gift, and I hope I’m using it well.”
Allen-Agostini’s YA novel Home Home (Papillote Press, 2019; Delacorte Press, 2020) showcases her talent across genres. A poet, too, Allen-Agostini’s Swallowing the Sky (Cane Arrow Press, 2015) reveals her range as a writer.
Reflecting on her literary journey, she admits she felt the pressure to pin her writing down to a single genre “Ironically, my first published novel was YA sci-fi, as a genre as it comes. Now, I don’t care about genre. Not everybody has to be VS Naipaul. I only care about telling great stories.”
Her most recent work, a historical noir novella, Death in the Dry River, published in August 2024, reflects her enduring dedication to storytelling as she turns back the clock to 1932 Port-of-Spain, recreating a world she never lived but has vividly imagined.
Allen-Agostini’s research for Death in the Dry River was supported by the NALIS Heritage Library and UWI-STA Alma Jordan Library’s West Indiana and Special Collections Division.
She also credits the late historian, writer, and publisher Gérard Anthony Besson HBM (January 20, 1942–July 25, 2023) for his Police Museum, which provided rich detail for her protagonist, Sonny Stone. “What is historical is the world of the novella, the Port-of-Spain of 1932, and the kind of people you meet in the pages of the story,” she explains.
The following extract throws us into a gripping chase through Port-of-Spain, where past and present collide, and history and fiction intertwine. As Sonny Stone pursues a young boy through the gritty streets, Allen-Agostini masterfully blends the historical with the thrilling, offering a vivid glimpse into a bygone era.
Extract Death in the Dry River (1000Volt Press, August 2024) with all permissions granted exclusively for the Sunday Guardian WE magazine. Allen-Agostini remains at the forefront of literary innovation. Her exploration of genres—from crime fiction to poetry—demonstrates her ability to engage and challenge readers with her distinct voice and fresh perspective.
Extract from Death in the Dry River
Someone standing on Duke Street that April day in 1932 would have seen a tall black man in khaki pants and a white cotton vest, his feet in red woollen sandals, running like the wind behind three little black boys. Two of the boys peeled away into a yard at the corner of George and Prince Streets, but one, the biggest, kept going. Moving as fast as his knobby knees would churn, the walnut-shell-brown boy took a hard right onto Prince and ran for his life.
Sonny was hardly winded. Running, his reflexes took over. He was fifteen again and felt the whips of cocoa branches on his face as he ran down a hill in Grande Riviere, his bulging calves scraped by weeds and his slender toes squelching in the muck of rotting leaves and flowers on the ground.
The boy kept running, skidding in a puddle when his foot slipped into the murky drain beside the cobbled pavement. He scrambled up, never quite stopping, and took off again.
This was not Grande Riviere but Port-of-Spain. The smell Sonny inhaled when he ran past the puddle wasn’t the dark, sweet velvet of the bush but the sharp and acrid smell of rubbish, stagnant water, and piss.
They were close to the river.
The Dry River was a wide, flat, paved canal through which a trickle of water flowed. Its source was the St Ann’s River in the lush hills north of the city. During the dry season it devolved into a sullen creek making its way to the Gulf of Paria. Paved only a year earlier, the river’s worst excesses of filth were behind it but Sonny still groaned when he realised the little boy he pursued was heading for the track that would take him into the waterway.
“Don’t dare jump down in that river, boy!” he shouted, knowing even as he did that the boy planned just that. The woolly head disappeared over the bank.
Sonny slowed to a halt, his feet pounding in the dusty brown grass that lined the bank.
Peering down, he saw the track, a stony, steep path worn into the side of the river by little boys like the one he was chasing. The track ended about five feet above the riverbed, where it gave way to a wall. The boy was nearly gone now. Sonny was on the verge of turning back when he heard a short, high shriek.
Little boys, when they’re frightened, sound just like little girls. All their incipient manhood blows away like mango flowers in a storm leaving only a child and his fear.
Sonny spotted the boy’s dingy red and white striped jersey. The boy had come to a stop about thirty yards away and was cringing against the high wall of the river.
“What happen?” Sonny called, instantly forgetting his broken window and his promises of vengeance. “You see a snake? Is all right,” Sonny shouted, gingerly going down the crumbling path in the bank, leaving a trail of rolling stones behind his red alpagats as he jumped down. “If you leave it, it wouldn’t do you nothing…”
The boy only whimpered.
Sonny trotted past the piles of rotting rubbish through which the stubborn trickle of the river ran. A bloated dead cat, grey fur bristling in the wind, eyes closed to slits; a bag of blackened tomatoes; a soggy, brown leather loafer with no sole; an old paper kite, half its bright yellow life gone; a broken Cockspur Gold bottle, long emptied of rum.
The boy was standing a few feet from a high hump of garbage that looked like a rag picker’s bag. Only it wasn’t a bag. What looked like rags was a fine sharkskin suit. On a man who lay face down in the river in a pool of drying blood.
Sonny grabbed the boy and pressed the small, weeping face into his rock-hard belly. The slender shoulders shook.
“Is all right boy. He ain’t go do you nothing. Is all right.”
They stood there in the hot, fiercely white sun, the boy crying and Sonny thinking. Somebody would have to run to Besson Street to get the inspector, he was thinking. Somebody would have to tell this man’s wife or girlfriend or mother that he had met his end in a fine grey sharkskin suit in the Dry River.”
–End of Extract.
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a Fall 2024 Fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.
Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media journalist and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction for her memoir, Love The Dark Days.
Website: www.irasroom.org
