Given his status as one of the twentieth century’s most influential poets and musicians, Gil Scott-Heron’s early prose fiction has had a tendency to be somewhat eclipsed. The ‘godfather of rap’ took a year out of a degree he never finished to complete his novel The Vulture, which was published simultaneously with Small Talk at 125th and Lenox in 1970; and, while he did go on to publish another – The Nigger Factory – in 1972, the LP Heron made of Small Talk was to mark the beginning of a recording career from which he would not look back.
The Vulture is ostensibly a murder mystery – one which weaves together the lives of four men as it relates the story of the death of John Lee – but the novel is not so much a thrilling page-turner as a rich, poetic evocation of the lives of young black New Yorkers in the 1960s. The prose is imbued with the rhythms of Heron’s poetry, and it hangs somewhere between fiction and music even as it describes the grittiest of drug-related murders; indeed, when the characters name (as they often do) the songs playing at certain moments of their story, it only provides a label for the organic beat that has been running through the words themselves. The political consciousness and satirical edge present in Heron’s recorded music are equally felt in The Vulture, and there’s no denying that it’s a novel which is going to make you uncomfortable. The visceral reality of the world his characters inhabit gives you the feeling that you should just shut up and listen – this murder mystery is not one that invites the reader’s judgment.
The Vulture captures better than most other novels of the time the intangible atmosphere of the era it describes. You’re really living and breathing it until you’re hit with a killer line, such as, “They had decided long ago that the game of life really was not worth playing, because the inventor of the game kept most of the rules a secret,” that reminds you that this is the work of a poet who has constructed with absolute mastery a world that to you seems so very, very real. The ‘mystery’ element isn’t by any stretch the most exciting part of the book – indeed, the revelation of the murderer is so anticlimactic that it’s not initially obvious who it is – but it doesn’t matter; this novel is important. You only have to read it to know.
