I miss Larry Brown. We spent some time together here and in his hometown of Oxford, Miss. It's hard to believe he has been dead for 14 years.
You could look at Larry and not see much that seemed extraordinary; a wiry little guy with receding chestnut hair and sad-dog eyes patting his pockets for that pack of Marlboros. His face was creased like a farmer's and when he spoke the words backed out slow and careful, like 18-wheelers creeping to the loading dock behind the Walmart. He sounded deep Mississippi -- which he was -- kudzu cadences and soft solemn vowels.
He was a hell of a writer, with a direct simple voice. People called him self-taught, but no writer is really an autodidact. Writers learn by reading, by watching, by spying on the world. Brown may have famously flunked senior English in high school and may have earned college credit for only one writing class, but he had teachers like Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver and Bill Faulkner.
I miss the man, but also miss his style. In this modern world, it sometimes seems like narrative matters less than ever, and all stories are told in wink-wink, nudge-nudge collaboration with the audience. Everything moves fast and comes at us from all angles at once. We're being charged by Picasso's bull.
I get that; any way you can get over and connect is fine. As a reader, I don't mind doing a little of the work. But sometimes I just want a good story.
And it's not fair to compare Ace Atkins to Brown. Just because he resides in Oxford or because he sets his Quinn Colson novels in Mississippi. But I picked up his latest, The Sinners (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $27), expecting to put it right back down after a little while because that's what I do with most novels. I dip in and give them a chance to hook me. Most don't.
I don't know that I'd heard of Atkins before picking up The Sinners, although I must have heard something about him when the estate of Robert B. Parker selected him to take over the writing of the Spenser mysteries in 2011. But I didn't remember that and, to be fair, it would have prejudiced me against him because I'm not that fond of serial mysteries. I went through a phase where I read a bunch of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels in a relatively short period and most recently I've read a few of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books for their comic value. Otherwise I stay away.
But Atkins tells a pretty good story in The Sinners and he has a handle on some characters who seem not too much different from some of the more interesting people I ran into back when I used to be a cop reporter. Turns out that Atkins was also a cop reporter for a time; he worked for The Tampa Tribune before becoming a novelist full time. He has a reporter's eye for specific detail; his characters seem to be largely drawn from life.
You might expect from Atkins' workload that The Sinners follows the formulaic conventions of its genre. Quinn Colson is a bit of a Boy Scout, a former Army Ranger who now serves as sheriff of the (fictional) Tibbehah County in Mississippi. In addition to producing a yearly Spenser novel, Atkins has written seven other Colson books and four -- including a graphic novel -- featuring Nick Travers, an ex-college football player and blues historian who solves crimes in New Orleans. More interesting than the sheriff are the friends, allies and antagonists who make the county a pretty incestuous place. Most of The Sinners is set in the days immediately before Colson's wedding to nurse Maggie Powers, whose ex-husband must have been the sheriff's nemesis in a previous book.
But as the wedding preparations are underway, old-time bad guy Heath Pritchard, who Colson's uncle, Sheriff Hamp Beckett, put away 25 years before, has been released from Parchman. Heath returns to his old home place where his nephews Cody and Tyler have taken a high-tech approach to marijuana cultivation that has resulted in their producing a superior product that finances their dirt-track racing obsession.
But Heath is old-school and violent, and his rash actions result in a bloody turf war between the Pritchards and the remnants of the Dixie Mafia. And some of Colson's close friends get dragged into the middle of it.
While there's nothing terribly tricky in the plotting, Atkins is a clear-eyed writer who painlessly leads you through the escalating violence. It's workman-like, but what's wrong with good craft? The author's ear for dialogue is excellent and he grants even his bad folks a modicum of decency. You might even find yourself empathizing with the younger Pritchards, who might have made it over to the legal side of the street were it not for their cowboy Uncle Heath.
(I expect that Tyler will show up in the next Colson book as something more like a Colson ally. That seems to be how these things go.)
Anyway, Ace Atkins ain't Larry Brown. But that don't make him junk.
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Style on 07/15/2018