Lee is loosely based on the self-taught historian Lee Roy Chapman, a citizen journalist who unearthed the involvement of one of Tulsa’s founding fathers, Tate Brady, in the city’s 1921 race massacre. Chapman, who died in 2015, at the age of forty-six, was a friend of Harjo’s, as well as a colleague of his at the Oklahoma-based This Land Press. Like the character he inspired, Chapman was a Jack-of-all-trades and a dealer of rare books. But the similarities more or less end there. “The Lowdown” is a noir above all else, and the fictional Lee is unfettered by basic journalistic ethics: when he finds a stack of hundred-dollar bills in a skinhead’s car, he has no qualms about treating it like a winning lottery ticket.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter