For nearly a decade, twenty-nine-year-old Hudson Miller has made his living in the boxing ring, but a post-fight brawl threatens to derail his career. Desperate for money, Hudson takes a gig as a bouncer at a dive bar. That’s when life delivers him another hook to the jaw: his estranged father, Leland, has been murdered in what appears to be a robbery-gone-bad at his salvage yard, Miller’s Pull-a-Part.
I’ve been saying for a while that we need more stories that fall into the overlap between country noir and speculative fiction. The hollers and dark dirt roads that host country noir yarns have their own rich tradition of myths and folk tales. And speculative elements, perhaps especially horror, dovetail well with the bones of a country noir story—better than, certainly, romance or even mystery. In his novel The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones combines supernatural horror and rez noir (a kissing cousin to country noir). Four young Blackfeet Indians committed some great sin on an elk hunt years ago, and an angry spirit of sorts is looking for bloody restitution.
The mountains of North Carolina are my favorite country noir setting for the simple reason that they are home, and there is a rich tradition of country noir set in the Ozarks that we can probably credit to Daniel Woodrell, but it is always nice to get the chance to visit someplace new via fiction. The Sweet Goodbye is set in the North Maine Woods in the vast, empty, northernmost reaches of the contiguous states.
Welcome back to another short review roundup! Today I feature a couple of novels. One I will give short shrift because it is a sequel, and the first book in the series does all the heavy lifting of convincing a reader to pick up the next one. The other is a fine book but a bit too far afield to write extensively about on this blog. Both are worth picking up, notwithstanding the truncated reviews.
I have been slacking on my country noir reading here lately. I did find the time to finally crack open Tom Franklin’s short story collection Poachers, which includes the title story and nine other works of short fiction country noir. Each is set in South Alabama.
Elmore Leonard has been inordinately successful getting his books adapted to the screen. Justified, the TV show based on the character Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens from Pronto, Riding the Rap, and the short story Fire in the Hole (the last adapted for the Justified pilot), is as good as any Leonard adaption. Seeing his characters with such incredible life breathed into him had to have spurred Leonard return to Givens with his novel Raylan (which was to be his last).
I have been on a bit of an Elmore Leonard kick here lately. His work has everything I like about country noir, but in an easily digestible, popcorn style and form. My gateway to Elmore Leonard was the great Justified (which I still need to buy on blu-ray, rewatch, and blog about extensively). I was admittedly thrown off by my first Elmore Leonard novel, Raylan. Raylan suffered from covering ground already covered by the show. But it really suffered from eastern Kentucky not being Leonard’s turf. His work is always better in Florida, I think.
“This is who I am. I can’t change. I don’t want to, really. But for once I’m gonna put this devil inside me to good use.”
S.A. Cosby impressed me with Blacktop Wasteland. He absolutely blew me away with Razorblade Tears.
A killer premise is always a good start. Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee are plenty different. Ike is black; Buddy Lee is white. Ike built a business from the ground up and employs crews of workers; Buddy Lee’s work history is checkered at best. Ike is a comfortable business and home owner; Buddy Lee lives in a dilapidated single-wide trailer with a window unit that pushes around lukewarm air. Ike is happily married; Buddy Lee hasn’t been in a serious relationship since his son’s mom left him. But they have a few things in common too. Both did time in prison. Both have ample capacity to deal out violence. Neither could accept their son’s homosexuality. Their sons who were married to each other. Who were just murdered.
To paraphrase Solomon Kane, men will die for that.
I didn’t originally plan to write a post on Kill All Your Darlings. It is positioned as a psychological thriller and set on a college campus. Hardly the stuff of grit lit or country noir. But it is set in Kentucky, and Bell leavens the thriller tropes with enough (well-crafted) literariness and inserts enough grit into character backgrounds to slink onto these pages.
When you really love a subgenre, you don’t want to read the same thing over and over again, but you do want to see tweaks and new takes on your cherished tropes. Blacktop Wasteland falls right square in the country noir subgenre. It distinguishes itself from the field not just with execution but with a protagonist who is a wheelman (and all the car chases the choice suggests) and African-American.
Hillbilly Highways 