Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

As I was saying, I received a slew of crime novels and true-crime books submitted for the Hammett Prize 2011 for ‘literary excellence’ given each year by the International Association of Crime Writers/ North American Branch. I must now upgrade the total to 193. I mention the number because my wife does, over and over. She does this in making the point that I should not delude myself that I might keep them (hard-covers only, of course), stuffing them onto the groaning shelves of the bookcases on the three floors of our row-house in historic Downtown Albany. She has a point.

In taking this insensitive tone, my Rose turns a deaf ear (though all-seeing eye, I admit) to my claim to Bibliophile status. Not some ethereal lover, I must possess my books, fondle them, weigh their heft, gloat over the sewn bindings; swaddle them, front to back, in Bro-Dart plastic dust covers. “It’s me or the books,” she says. No contest…

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (HarperCollins Pub.) opens in a rural Mississippi Town. We’re in the point-of-view of 41-year-old Larry Ott, a mechanic living a solitary existence on the family farm, his only company a coop full of chickens named after the wives of U.S. presidents. As a teenager, he took a girl to a drive-in movie and she was never heard from again. He was never charged but always suspected in her disappearance. Twenty years have passed, it is now the late 1990s, and another young girl is missing. Silas “32” Jones, his only boyhood friend, is the Town Constable, a black man, a former high school baseball star, with a secret from the past that binds them still. Chapter two is in the point-of-view of Silas.

The first chapter is beautifully constructed, not only setting the story in rapid motion but, in the best tradition of fair-plotting, contains the seeds of the ending. ‘Ghosts’—here the protagonists’ past history—inform present action: a characteristic of the very best crime fiction being written. I’m thinking, particularly, of the novels of T. Jefferson Parker whose Iron River is a stand-out this year, and in past years Dennis Lehane’s unforgettable Mystic River and Don Winslow’s terrific Power of the Dog, to name just a few.

Tom Franklin is a poet in prose (a literary cousin to James Lee Burke), particularly in describing:

“Later he caboosed the procession to a graveyard miles out in the country, whites only buried there, lovely landscaped grounds, shaded by live oaks with Spanish moss slanted in the wind like beards of dead generals. Nothing like the wooded cemetery where Alice Jones lay under a little rock on the side of a hill eaten up with kudzu, the plastic flowers blown over and strewn by the wind…”

And this:

“Her breasts were little things under her top; he kept trying not to look at them. She had a concave figure, walking with a little hook to her, her belly in, as if waiting to absorb a blow. Today she wore sandals, and he liked her white freckled feet and red toenails…”

I wish I’d written that.

The thing about Franklin’s style, the metaphors, is, of course, their startling originality. They’re unself-conscious, call no attention to themselves, just suddenly in your face. His images are always earthbound, earthy, instantly seen in the mind’s eye.

We read mysteries because we can count on being taken out of ourselves, dropped into another world. Our best authors make that world vividly dense. Franklin does that for rural, small town Mississippi in the late 1970’s and late 1990’s. Interestingly, the racial divide of that time is painted in muted tones, simply as background and setting for the story he’s telling: very effective, very moving. Franklin describes Crooked Letter as "hopeful" compared to his other two novels: the first, Hell at the Breech, is a murder mystery set in a rural area of Franklin's native Alabama in 1897; His second, Smonk, a very atypical western set in Old Texas, Alabama, in 1911.

The book’s title? You may remember it from grammar school:

“M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I
Crooked letter-crooked letter-I
humpback-humpback-I.”

Don’t miss this one. Franklin won an Edgar a few years back for his debut collection of short stories: Poachers.

Next week, let’s talk about T. Jefferson Parker’s Iron River, where the ATF task force cops patrol the “iron river”, the flow of guns from U.S. dealers to Mexican drug cartels. Meet the ‘Zetas’. Very bad, very Noir.

—Robert Knightly

Judging for the Hammett Prize

In early February, I was asked if I wanted to be a reader of all the books submitted for the Hammett Prize 2011. Lest you think I have star-power to be so singled out, know that the Chair of the Committee is a friend. The Hammett is awarded by the International Association of Crime Writers (IACW/ North American Branch) each year to a work of ‘literary excellence’, usually a novel or true-crime book. I had heard from another friend who had been such a reader that the job entailed reading and judging, in his year, some 300 books. Undaunted,  I heard like a bee buzzing in my ear  that  publishers and authors themselves would be  sending me 300 hardcover books. To keep. That decided me. Bring ’Em On! I said.

The Hammett Prize (named after you-know-who) is a ‘Thin Man’ trophy sculpted by a toney artist. Nice! But no money. But a rousing presentation at a Mystery Convention. Next September 20-21st  at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers (NAIBA) conference at the Trump Marina in Atlantic City. Every other year it’s at ‘Bloody Words’ in Toronto. Only American or Canadian authors might submit books published during 2010. December 1, 2010 was the deadline.

So…I ‘read’ only 189 books--disappointing! I’d been promised 300-- in search of  the cream of  the ‘literary’ mystery crop. My four fellow readers were reading the same titles at the same time. I say ‘read’ because within a few pages, no further than Chapter One, you knew if you were holding the real McCoy.  No purpose would be served in plodding on. I am not one of those sturdy readers who feel a religious calling to read on to the painful end.  So… What did I find?

First, many of the true-crime entries were paperbacks, of the Chainsaw-Freddie stripe. The hardbacks were better, more honest reads, usually in-depth recountings of  sensational murders or serial killers, old and knew. Typical titles: ‘The Devil’s Rooming House: the True Story of  America’s Deadliest Female Serial Killer’ and ‘Killer Colt’, set in Gilded Age New York City.

My big discovery, however: Not many of us dabble in ‘literary crime-writing’, defined as a published work of adult fiction or narrative nonfiction, describable as about crime, or a suspense, thriller, mystery or espionage work of literary excellence. For the most part, members of our tribe write solidly-plotted, full-bodied character-d page-turners to the delight of our legion of fans. Our literary brethren obviously do as well or they wouldn’t continue to be published. But they have something more: what I think of as the literary gene because their names are known to us, and they’re repeaters.

What makes a mystery literary? The language, no doubt, but surely the dimension of  the book, its breadth and capacity to awe  us. Analysis was unnecessary, I just knew, felt when I was reading such a creature, either right off or later on.

I selected my ten, it wasn’t hard to do, they just stood out. In my next column, I’ll talk about each book and its author.

--Robert Knightly