Book Review: Rough Trade

Celebrating Black History Month 2023

Book Review: 'Rough Trade' by Cole Riley

2 / 5 Stars

“That’s youth talking.” Benny Seven snatched the pipe from the woman. “Well, I’ll say this. Enjoy your youth now, girlie. It goes so fast. Soon there’ll come a time when you see a few wrinkles in your face and the gray hairs'll start creeping in. Your market value goes down if you know what I mean. Old age eases up on you little by little. Yes, sir, the clock is always running.”

Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we celebrate Black History Month by reading and reviewing nonfiction and fiction books that illuminate the black experience. We try to focus on books that are less well-known, and have lapsed into undeserved obscurity.

For Black History Month 2023, we're reviewing 'Rough Trade' (192 pp.), a 1987 mass-market paperback published by the pioneering black fiction publisher Holloway House. The cover artist is uncredited.

‘Rough Trade’ (320 pp.) in set in New York City in the late 1980s. As the novel opens, we are introduced to Velma and Claudia, two of the foxiest young chicks in East Harlem. 

Both women are enjoying the allure of the Street Life, but in the opening pages of ‘Rough Trade’, a meetup with a hustler leads to a confrontation with a group of ruthless thugs. Only an act of suicidal courage on Claudia’s part persuades the thugs to let Velma go free. 

Traumatized psychologically and physically by her treatment at the hands of the thugs and the death of her best friend, Velma finds herself drifting from place to place, and man to man, in a desperate search for well-being. The lure of drugs, with which she can self-medicate, leads Velma even further into decline. Even the well-meaning interventions of her sister Vandella, and her boyfriend Nick, fail to deter Velma from her wayward path.  

Just as Velma’s life reaches its lowest ebb, a troubling rumor comes to her ear, a rumor circulating around Harlem that a woman resembling the deceased Claudia is alive and well in the baddest part of town. 

Velma must make a deal with the odious pimp Benny Seven to learn the whereabouts of the Claudia lookalike………..Benny of course wants something in return, and he has tastes that shock even the street-hardened Velma. But as Velma will learn, nothing in her life has prepared her for the revelations that come with her search for Claudia…………

According to the Simon and Schuster ‘Author’ directory, ‘Cole Riley’ is the pseudonym used by:

‘……an innovative voice in urban literature, produced several early street classics: ‘Hot Snake Nights’, ‘Rough Trade’, ‘The Devil To Pay’, ‘The Killing Kind’, ‘Dark Blood Moon’, and more……. He lives and writes in New York City.’

‘Rough Trade’ isn’t a successful novel. It's an uneven, at times awkward, mix of hardcore ghetto mayhem with considerable exposition on personality crises and conflicts. 

While the opening and closing chapters are suitably harrowing, even displaying a Splatterpunk sensibility, the bulk of the narrative relies on melodrama, with Velma having emotionally laden conversations with her sister, with her boyfriend Nick, her mother, and her psychiatrist. Indeed, at times, ‘Rough Trade’ comes across as a ‘ghetto’ analogue to Judith Rossner’s 1983 psychiatric drama ‘August’.

Having to wade through so much angst, it was gratifying to arrive at the novel’s denouement and find it devoid of contrivance, but the final chapter comes across as a little too pat to be effective.

Summing up, if you are a devotee of the Holloway House catalog (entries in which are increasingly rarer, and more expensive, to acquire) and what could be called proto- Urban Fiction, then picking up a copy of 'Rough Trade' may be worth your while if you can find the book for a reasonable price.