Book Review: Crooked Letters, Crooked Letters
Crooked Letters, Crooked Letters. Tom Franklin. Crime fiction.
In an era of formula crime fiction, coming across something different is always refreshing for a reader of the genre, writes Brian Byrne.
'Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter' is just that. And I didn't come across it, Julie in the Library held it out to me. Something she's really good at, knowing what her customers might like.
The story is set in Mississippi, and I was taken with her suggestion because one of my favourite writers is James Lee Burke who locates most of his works close by in New Orleans. I've never been there, but through Burke's books I know that I will find the region quite familiar when I do get to it.
This one is by an author I've not read before, Tom Franklin. He only has two other books, but I intend to request them. Because, quite apart from the exceptionally well-crafted story, his sense of place attracts me as a travel writer.
Briefly, the story is about an auto mechanic, Larry Otts, who has very few customers in the business he inherited from his father because he has been an unconvicted suspect for most of his life in the disappearance of a young girl he dated just once.
His past and present, and the people who have made him what he is from both then and now, are the stuff of a narrative written back and forwards in a very proficient manner. I didn't get confused, I was constantly surprised. But gently, so that I was always offered the opportunity to work things towards the outcome for myself.
There are quite a few characters in the story. All of them very real if one has any knowledge at all of the quite convoluted American rural southern town psyche. But most of all, Franklin gets, and writes, the individual humanity of each of them, whether police, common citizens, or criminals.
For me it was a book read not through at once, but in different segments and even in different countries, on different airplanes, because of my work schedule at the time. And that actually suited it, because the pace didn't dictate immediate consumption of the whole story. It sits as parts in the back of the mind, teasing out the various strands of the narrative. It is a book easy to come back to after a break and not have to drill back much into memory to pick up again on the details.
There is a lot of character in this book, as opposed to characters. And there's a satisfaction in the outcome. Along with a sense of hope. Most of all, Franklin writes a story that a reader from any small community in any country could probably relate to.
It's a story based in America's deep south. But it has happened everywhere.
Recommended highly.
