Odalie radiates glamour and danger, and before long, she is whisking Rose to speakeasies all around the city. Rindell cites The Great Gatsby in her acknowledgements and there are many tributes to Fitzgerald's novel in The Other Typist, including a party at a Long Island mansion that might as well be Jay Gatsby's. Rose tells us, 'Her voice quivered with a sort of tomboy energy that suggested, despite her refined poise and sophistication, she was a robust individual,' but also that 'the voluptuous glee in Odalie's demeanor hinted at privilege, at a childhood that had been filled with automobiles and tennis courts.' Odalie is Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker rolled into one. She espouses a conservative kind of modernism specific to the 1920s, one that allows her to celebrate the technologies that give her gender a new freedom in the workplace, but deplore the sexual freedom of the Jazz Age.Įnter Odalie Lazare, the other typist of the title and the very embodiment of Jazz Age licentiousness. ('As a moral person, I do not relish hearing these gruesome details' she says of the confessions she types). Rose purports to be a poor orphan, raised by nuns and schooled in a trade by necessity at the Astoria Stenographers College for Ladies. So what implications does this clinical attitude toward the truth have for Rose's first-person narration of her own tale in Rindell's debut The Other Typist? Rose solves that problem with just a few keystrokes, and the killer goes to jail. In an early scene, Rose and her bosses are frustrated at their inability to crack a serial killer whom they know for certain is guilty. She is hinting of her power within the elaborate process of legally created truth. Rose speaks of 'the truth' not as an objective thing but as something created. If you raised your eyebrow at that phrase - 'come to be known as the truth' - you are right. I am there to transcribe what will eventually come to be known as the truth.' 'I am there,' she says, 'to make the official and unbiased record that will eventually be used in court. Her job is to record on a stenograph the confessions that the Sergeant or Lieutenant Detective extract from suspects, and then transcribe her dictation using a typewriter.

Rose Baker is a typist at a New York City police precinct. Oh, how clever Suzanne Rindell was to make her protagonist a writer. In Suzanne Rindell's debut The Other Typist, Rose, a typist in a New York City police precinct, is drawn fully into new typist, Odalie's, high-stakes world.

The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell