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Author Q & A with Tom Clavin

On March 24, 2019

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 24)

Among those worthy of celebrity status in mid-19th century America were rugged gunslingers whose reputations were often built on myths and legends borne of truth and tragedy–and one who reached the heights of notoriety was Wild Bill Hickock.

New York Times bestselling author Tom Clavin adds to his collection of historical nonfiction with Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter, examining in detail the life and rowdy times of this iconic American figure.

Notoriety gained from the press made Hickock a nationally known figure, and thus, placed a target on his back for hotshots who wanted to make a name for themselves as the man who would take him down.

A quick-draw artist who was known for his accuracy and courage when it came to gunfights, Hickock became a lawman at 20, and wen ton to hold the titles of Army scout, federal marshal, and Union spy. It would be a bullet that would end his life at age 39.

Clavin has served as a newspaper and web editor, magazine writer, TV/radio commentator and reporter for the New York Times. Among his career credits are awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation, an dthe National Newspaper Association. His book include Dodge City, The Heart of Everything That Is, and Valley Forge. Clavin lives in Sag Harbor, New York.

“Wild Bill” Hickock, hom you describe as the “first post-Civil War celebrity of the West,” was well-known as America’s first gunfighter during the 1800s–but his real name wasn’t even Bill. Tell us how James Butler Hickock became popularly known as “Bill”–and how he earned the legendary title of “Wild.”

Tom Clavin

Two separate events resulted in “Wild Bill.” The first and less dramatic is he had a brother who called himself Bill–his real name was Lorenzo–and probably as a joke when traveling together on a steamship on the Missouri River they called each other Bill. Lorenzo disembarked, “Jim” Hickock pushed on, and passengers called him Bill, and he got comfortable about this.

The “Wild” part happened after he entered a saloon fight on the side of a bartender outnumbered 6-to-1, and onlookers thought that was a wildly gutsy thing to do. From 1861 on, he was Wild Bill Hickock.

Why do say in your Author’s Note that it was a “gullible and impressionable public” that made Wild Bill bigger than all of the legendary frontier figures (like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson) who came before him?

There had always been a hunger back East for tall tales about frontier figures, bu the public became especially ravenous after the Civil War when the American frontier exploded with seemingly limitless potential. Hickock cut a romantic, larger-than-life figure and had a distinctive look and there was a bigger than ever number of readers. All this combined to almost overnight elevating him to superstar status.

It was a Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article in February 1867 that first spread Hickock’s name and legend across the nation, making him nationally famous at age 29. What effect did that article have on Hickock’s life?

The article made him very famous. He could not have been prepared for that, but he sort of took his fame in stride. Hickock did not seek attention, but he didn’t hide from it, either. He was mostly a modest man, but a part of him enjoyed being almost a mythical figure. The downside was much of his fame was as a best-in-the-West gunfighter, making him a target for those younger and possibly faster who wanted to take that title. For the rest of his life, he had to wonder which bullet had his name on it.

Briefly, for what exploits was Wild Bill best known?

Though we don’t have a lot of details, his years as a spy behind Confederate lines were full of exciting exploits. Obviously, being a gunfighter who could shoot faster and more accurately than any man he encountered. And especially when marshal of Abilene in Kansas, Hickock became the prototype of the two-fisted and two-gun frontier lawman. And he was the most well-known of Western plainsmen.

“Wild Bill,” was described as “the handsome, chivalrous, yet cold-eyed killer who roamed the prairie, a kind friend to children and a quick-drawing punisher of evildoers.” He died at age 39, and you liken his life to a Shakespearean tragedy. Explain how that comparison fits.

Hickock fits into that tragic mold dating from Euripides in Ancient Greece and elevated by Shakespeare of the hero who attained heights, but flaws felled him. The West changed fast around Wild Bill Hickock, and he was unable to adapt–and he was a gunfighter going blind.

Like many tragic heroes in literature, he sensed his days were short and life had been unfair but he courageously accepted what was to come. Hickock was an honorable man ultimately dealt a bad hand.

Tom Clavin will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 27, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Wild Bill. Lemuria has chosen Wild Bill as its April 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Tom Clavin’s ‘Wild Bill’ sets record straight on wild west gunfighter

By Guest Author

On March 21, 2019

In History, Western

By Jim Ewing. Special to the Clarion Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

For those not especially knowledgeable about tales of the old frontier (other than movies and TV shows), Tom Clavin’s Wild Bill is full of surprises.

The first surprise in the book subtitled “The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter” is that that Wild Bill Hickok’s name wasn’t Bill.

It’s believed that the man born as James Butler Hickok often joked with his brother Lorenzo by calling each other Bill. Since he answered to it, the name stuck. It may be also that James was known as the Wild Bill and his brother was the Tame Bill.

He signed all documents J.B. Hickok throughout his life.

Whether true or apocryphal, there’s no dispute that Wild Bill was an incredible marksman. Ambidextrous, he early on carried Colt Navy .36-cal. pistols facing butt out on each hip, which he later exchanged for double-action Colt .44s filed down for quicker action. He shot with both hands simultaneously and equally accurately.

“Witnesses report seeing Hickok driving a cork through the neck of a whiskey bottle at 20 paces, splitting a bullet on the edge of dime at the same distance, and putting as many as a dozen bullet holes in a tomato can that had been tossed in the air,” Clavin reports.

This skill made him a formidable foe in a gun battle and it also tended to dissuade lawbreakers when he served as marshal for the town of Abilene, Kansas, frequently putting on shows to demonstrate his prowess.

He also didn’t quite fit his “wild” moniker in his bearing and manner, in that he was by all accounts a cool customer. Raised in an abolitionist family in Illinois, during the Civil War, he served as a Union scout and spy, often going behind Confederate lines, and was able to coolly talk his way out of some tight binds. It was this ability to talk his way out of trouble, backed by his reputation as a crack shot, that later served him well as a lawman.

Much of what is known of Hickok through movies and Wild West shows is also probably fabricated, Clavin reveals. For example, it’s doubtful, he says, that Hickok and Calamity Jane were lovers. While they were friends, contemporary accounts seem to indicate that the somewhat dandy-ish Hickok who wore expensive clothes and bathed every day (an unheard-of practice at the time), considered her rather uncouth. She was prone to drunkenness and a prostitute who also wrangled horses, mules and cattle, usually wore men’s clothes, and was not known for her hygiene.

He also was devoted to his wife, Agnes, whom he married rather late in life (about the time he knew Jane), and she was flamboyant in a different way, as the owner of a circus and a world-renowned performer.

Calamity Jane claimed she and Hickok were lovers and had herself buried next to him at Deadwood, S.D., where he was shot dead from behind while playing what came to be called the dead man’s hand in poker: two pair, aces and eights.

What is known, according to Clavin, was that Hickok was the first fast-draw gunslinger in the Old West. His killing of a man in Springfield, Missouri, (Clavin says Independence, Missouri) July 21, 1865, by quick draw methods—rather than pacing off a duel—was widely reported and was quickly emulated across the West.

Unfortunately, because it also happened while he was quite young, it caused “shootists” who came along after to seek him out to show who was the fastest draw. He died at 39, Aug. 2, 1876, victim of a self-styled gunslinger who crept up on him.

But if a bushwhacker didn’t get him, the times would have. Hickok set the mold for gunman/lawmen who faced off in high noon style, but when he was killed, towns were shifting to “peace officers,” who arrested lawbreakers to take them before a judge, Clavin notes.

Hickok remained true to himself “while the West changed around him.”

Wild Bill is filled with the famous names of the West, such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, and the rest. It is a fascinating account of an incredible Western icon, diligently researched, and breath-taking in its scope.

Jim Ewing, a former writer and editor at the Clarion Ledger, is the author of seven books including his latest, Redefining Manhood: A Guide for Men and Those Who Love Them.

James Meredith’s ‘Three Years in Mississippi’ receives a much needed reprint

By Guest Author

On March 20, 2019

In Civil Rights, Southern History

By Gregg Mayer. Special to the Clarion Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

Few individuals in Mississippi’s modern history are as emboldened, important and inscrutable as James Meredith.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi in 1962, Meredith has been a challenging and criticizing voice in the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi ever since. In some ways, Meredith started it all in his home state, and he documented that struggle in his first book Three Years in Mississippi (UPM, $30), a 336-page memoir that this year received a much-needed reprint by the University Press of Mississippi.

Originally published in 1966, Three Years in Mississippi takes readers back into Meredith’s own raw words shortly after he had returned to his home state in 1960 having spent ten years away.

“To understand the events that occurred during my three years in Mississippi, one must always remember that I returned to my home state to fight a war,” he writes. Throughout his first-person account, Meredith refers to himself as if a soldier in battle.

Meredith chronicles the events in diary-like fashion, using bold headings–such as Provoking the Attention of the Police, The All-Night Session, The Question of My Security–about what he saw, who was with him, and the attitudes and culture he was trying to change.

The centerpiece is Meredith’s denial of admission and eventual lawsuit against Ole Miss, a suit that was nearly ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which had ended public school segregation.
In leading up to the legal challenge, Meredith includes the complete texts of letters he wrote to Civil Rights leaders of the time, including to Thurgood Marshall, who would later sit on the U.S. Supreme Court:

“I have always been a ‘conscientious objector’ to my ‘oppressed status’ as long as I can remember,” Meredith wrote Marshall. “I am familiar with the probable difficulties involved in such a move as I am undertaking and I am fully prepared to pursue it all the way to a degree from the University of Mississippi.”

With the support of the NAACP, Meredith filed suit in federal court after his admission was denied. Long excerpts of court testimony are included in the book. The trial judge incredulously found that “[t]he evidence overwhelmingly showed that the Plaintiff was not denied admissions because of his race,” adding that race was not even considered by the University. Such hollow pronouncements were eventually reversed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Meredith was admitted to school.

On September 29, 1962, Meredith traveled to Oxford, but he writes he turned around amid reports of rioting. It wasn’t until two days later, with the smell of tear gas still in the air, that Meredith was on campus and learned the full extent of the rioting, including that two men were killed and several injured.

“Some newspapermen later asked me if I thought attending the university was worth all this death and destruction,” Meredith writes. “The question really annoyed me. Of course, I was sorry! I hadn’t wanted this to happen. I believe it could have been prevented by responsible political leadership in Mississippi.”

Enduring harassment as a daily routine, Meredith earned his political science degree from Ole Miss on August 18, 1963. Since that transformative time, Meredith has made his way down many unexpected paths, and over the years, “squandered his reputation through odd political choices, business failings, and quirky behavior,” writes University of Memphis Professor Aram Goudsouzian in a brilliantly illuminating introduction to the book that puts this touchstone event in Civil Rights history into contextual focus.

But despite whatever Meredith chose to do after his time in Oxford, the import of Three Years in Mississippi is how it powerfully records the fervent narrative of a young man who lived within a system that considered him inferior, and he pushed back against it.

Gregg Mayer is a lawyer and writer who serves as Chief Operating Officer at Mississippi Public Broadcasting. He graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Mississippi Law Journal.

James Meredith will be at Lemuria on Saturday, April 13, in conversation with Cara Meredith and Jamar Tisby, at 2:00 p.m.

Leaving Never Hurts as Much as Being Left Behind: Jeff Zentner’s ‘Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee’

By Former Lemurians

On March 19, 2019

In OZ: Young Adult Fiction

by Andrew Hedglin

As a 32 year-old man, I realize that I’m probably not the person who’s supposed to be writing this post about this delightful new YA book by Jeff Zentner. I am certainly not the intended primary audience. But sometimes a person wants to read about people who are not exactly like himself, and I was young, once, giving me as good a frame of reference as required. And I was the person who encountered this book. So I shall tell about it.

Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee is about two teenage girls, Delia Wilkes and Josie Howard, who are trying to navigate the end of their high school while hosting a horror-movie-of-the-week TV show on a public access channel in Jackson, Tennessee.

Delia and her mother, both struggling with depression, were abandoned ten years earlier by Delia’s father, who left behind only an extensive collection of cheesy horror tapes in his wake. Delia loves the movies for two reasons: first, they remind her of him. Second, Delia keeps the flame for all the mediocre people of the world, “the ones who try their hardest to make something beautiful, something great, something that someone will remember and talk about when they’re gone–and they come up short. And not by a little bit. By a lot.” Delia, an average student, feels a great kinship with these people.

She does create one thing, though, by force of will–Midnite Matinee–in the hopes that her father will see it while flipping channels one day and be proud of her, or regret leaving, or…something.

Delia’s co-host, best friend, and general partner-in-crime is Josie Howard. Josie has dreamed of a career in television since as long as she could remember. She seems, to most people, to shine just a little bit brighter than Delia. She’s headed to four-year university instead of community college, and attracts all the boys she and Delia meet together, including one Lawson Vargas, a MMA fighter who goes to a different school, and turns out to be deeper than at initial glance. Josie is extremely loyal to Delia, but her parents are pressuring her to pursue an internship at the Food Network in Knoxville if she is serious about her TV dreams.

But Delia has a plan. The hosts of Midnite Matinee have been invited to ShiverCon in Orlando, and have a chance to meet the influential Jack Divine, who’s as famous in the horror-hosting world as a person can be. Maybe if Divine can help Midnite Matinee reach a certain level of success, Josie wouldn’t have to leave Jackson to become famous on TV. Furthermore, Delia has hired a private detective to track down her missing father, who just happens to live in Boca Raton, a few hours south of Orlando. Can Delia possibly confront both her past, through her father, and her future, in Jack Divine, in one trip?

Delia, Josie, and Lawson are extremely vivid, charming characters with clear motivations facing real change in a pivotal time in their lives. Delia and Josie’s sassy humor gives welcome levity to the big decisions they have to face. Their stakes never feel forced (although there is one somewhat cartoonish episode during the Florida part of the adventure), and their reactions feel perfectly natural. Like Delia and Josie themselves, mostly I wished that their story together wouldn’t end.

If you want to take that journey with Delia and Josie, we here at Lemuria have two great ways for you to do it. First, we still have some signed first editions available at our online store.

Second, if you’re like me, you like to listen to audiobooks in addition to reading, because then you have twice the time available for books. But boxed audiobooks are inconvenient and expensive, so you’ve probably been paying for digital audiobooks an Audible subscription, right?

Well, how about supporting your local independent bookstore instead? With libro.fm, now you can do both. Click the banner below to begin. By selecting Lemuria as your home store, every audiobook you purchase helps support us, your local bookstore, instead of a huge corporate monolith. We sure would appreciate it. And if you’re thinking about listening to Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, narrators Phoebe Strole as Delia and Sophie Amoss as Josie make a great book even better.

Author Q & A with Peter Heller

By Guest Author

On March 17, 2019

In Fiction

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 17)

Award-winning, bestselling author Peter Heller reinforces his standing among America’s notable adventure writers with his riveting newest edition, The River.
The hair-raising novel begins with two college friends embarking on the challenge of canoeing the Maskwa River in northern Canada, but what was expected to be a leisure trip turns into a desperate wilderness survival test beyond their imaginations.

An avid outdoorsman and adventure traveler, Heller’s writing is heavily influenced by these personal passions, resulting in three previous novels (bestsellers Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars) and four nonfiction works.

He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction and is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He lives in Denver.

The River, and many of your previous books reveal your strong interest in adventure and nature stories. How did you develop your interest in writing about the outdoors?

Peter Heller

Ever since I was the littlest kid, all I wanted to do when I grew up was be a cowboy and drift the High Lonesome for weeks on horseback, or mountaineer, or canoe wild rivers. Maybe tough for a kid growing up in Brooklyn. But I loved reading anything about nature, about wild places, and the sea. And I think I knew that I would write about these places one day, because I began to study botany, ecology, birds. In college I learned to kayak, and that became a way to explore some of the most beautiful country.

I wrote about those expeditions for magazines, and in composing the stories I learned a lot that I used later on in writing fiction–techniques for creating a vivid sense of place and characters that jump off the page; and I learned about cadence and pacing.

I’m still happiest sitting at a fire by some mountain creek, drinking coffee, or stringing a fly rod. So now when I’m writing a novel, I often transport myself to the places I want to be, and they are usually remote, and there is usually a fire and a stream, rain, wind, the cries of birds.

The story in The River revolves around its two main characters, college students Jack and Wynn, opposites in many ways. Could you describe their friendship, and what drew them together?

Jack is a tough ranch kid from Kremmling, Colorado. He’s spent half his life in the saddle, and cooking over a fire and sleeping under the stars are second nature. Wynn is an architect’s son from Vermont. He’s a gentle giant, sweet in every cell, who loves nothing more than making ephemeral art out of stones and water. But they both love books–novels and adventure stories, and poetry–and they are both consummate outdoorsmen. They meet on a freshman orientation backpack trip in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, and they outstrip the group by miles as they talk excitedly about adventure stories and wild country. They discover that they are not at all literary snobs: they both adore Louis L’Amour westerns.

They become fast friends. What makes their friendship work, aside from these shared loves, is that they complement each other: Wynn expects the best from people, Jack is more skeptical and wary. And sometimes one has more appetite for risk, sometimes the other. How those traits play out is crucial to the story in The River.

The ill-fated river trip they plan as a leisurely break turns sinister, as they face not only unbelievable forces of weather and wildfire, but the possibility of being tracked by a would-be murderer. It is during this trip that Wynn discovers a different side of Jack, one that frightens him. What can you tell us about that, without giving the story away?

Jack is a hunter. He grew up facing extremes of weather in the rugged mountains of western Colorado. He spent weeks at a time in on horseback. He also suffered a hard personal tragedy when very young, and it affirmed his reticence, and gave him a certain wariness toward the vanities of humans, especially his own. He is tough to the bone. What Wynn discovers is that Jack is willing to protect their little party at all costs, without hesitation. That he is a warrior. That discovery can be scary.

Your description of the wildfire they battled is described in amazing detail. How were you able to write about this so realistically?

Years ago, when I was living in Paonia, Colorado, I stepped outside and saw a plume of smoke rising out of the junipers on the north side of the valley. I thought it looked very close to my friends’ place. I threw a shovel and a chainsaw in the back of the truck and raced up there.

By the time I got up the rough dirt track to the house there was a wall of dark smoke upwind. A volunteer fire truck was already there. We began cutting trees around the house, shoveling out flames where sparks landed, while Chuck and Jane shuttled valuables to their cars. Suddenly a stiff gust blew through and we heard trees exploding and the wall of smoke became flame. The firemen cut their hoses and yelled “Outta here!” I’ll never forget bumping down the track at the head of a line of vehicles with a cat doing crazy laps in the cab and smoke and sparks and flames crossing the road. We got down to a big irrigation canal where all the police and first responders had gathered, and I looked back. Ninety seconds later the fire swept the whole hillside. It was that close. It made a deep impression on me.

I also called Jim Mason, a fire chief and wildland firefighter in Glenwood Springs, who had battled some of the deadliest wildfires in our history, and he was invaluable in providing details, and in helping me understand some of the science of fire.

What’s your next literary “adventure”?

I just finished a very different novel called The Orchard. It’s about a young woman and her 8- year-old daughter who move to an orchard in southern Vermont. The woman, Hayley, is a towering translator of a famous Tang Dynasty poet named Li Xue. The book is about mothers and daughters, and language, and the power of place and of storytelling. I’m very excited about it.

Lemuria has selected Peter Heller’s The River as its April 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

Such Sweet Sorrow: ‘Lovely War’ by Julie Berry

By Former Lemurians

On March 15, 2019

In Historical Fiction, OZ: Young Adult Fiction

by Trianne Harabedian

The Nightingale. All The Light We Cannot See. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. I loved them, you loved them. If we’re being honest, there’s just something about a beautifully written World War II novel, with intrigue and tragedy and a little romance, that’s like literary catnip. We can’t get enough.

So I absolutely have to tell you about another book that you are going to love: Lovely War by Julie Berry. It’s a little different from the others. It’s got the intrigue, the tragedy, and more than a little romance. But… it’s set during World War I. Gasp! How can such a novel exist without Nazis, the brazenness of women in the forties, the preexisting tragedy of a world that had not yet recovered from the Great War? I promise that not only can it work, but it can work so beautifully that you’re not going to be able to put this novel down.

It’s 1942. The goddess Aphrodite is in a hotel room with her lover, Ares, when her husband, Hephaestus ensnares them in a net. As they argue about love, Aphrodite offers to illustrate her points by telling the story of four mortals living during World War I. As she weaves her tale, the other gods help by telling their perspectives on certain events. Aphrodite covers the romance, Apollo the music, Ares the war, and Hades the death.

The story begins with Hazel, a sheltered girl who lives in London and plays piano. On this particular evening, she is playing at a war benefit when she notices a young man standing to the side. Their eyes meet, Aphrodite gives them a nudge, and that’s it. Suddenly they’re sneaking out of their homes to meet for coffee, attending the symphony, and falling in love while knowing James will leave in a week for the war front. Unfortunately, their time is cut short when he is summoned to training a few days early. Their romance continues to blossom via letters, and Hazel decides that she needs to help with the war effort. To her parents’ dismay, she moves to Saint-Nazarie, France, as an entertainment volunteer for the troops.

This is where Aphrodite introduces us to our second couple. Colette is an orphan from Belgium, her life ravaged by the war, who seeks solace in volunteering for others. She and Hazel become fast friends at the YMCA where they are stationed. They bond over their love of music and their frustration over the segregation among the soldiers. The girls are shocked that they are not even allowed to enter the colored camp, as Colette is a foreigner and Hazel comes from a very accepting family. But they soon find a way to get around the rule.

Aubrey is a jazz prodigy who has been dragged into a military band. When he hears Hazel playing piano one evening, he can’t help but sneak into the building, introduce himself, and sit down to play. And when Colette steps out of her room in nothing but a scandalous nightgown, everything is over for Aubrey. He returns night after night, after the girls’ supervisor has gone to bed, to play piano and win Colette’s heart. He has nearly succeeded when, after a horrifying incident with some Americans from another camp, he is forced to unexpectedly go on tour with the band. Because of the incident, he doesn’t feel that he can write to Colette, and she is left aching at his sudden disappearance.

With both couples separated, the novel twists and turns. The mortals are given small tastes of love as Aphrodite schemes to allow them to meet for a few days here and there. But the war breaks them all. No one escapes the pain of violence, racial oppression, and death. No one is left mentally, physically, or emotionally unscathed. But their love for each other, both romantically and as four friends, remains steadfast.

I laughed, I cried, and I read this book far too quickly. Then, for days afterward, I didn’t want to read anything else. It’s the next beautiful war novel that we’re going to recommend to all our friends and talk about for years. It’s the novel I didn’t know I was waiting for.

New native son battles enemies, self in ‘Cemetery Road’ by Greg Iles

By Guest Author

On March 14, 2019

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10)

The “Natchez Burning trilogy” cemented Greg Iles’ place in the top tier of America’s literary blockbusters. The novels met with commercial and critical success, spanning 2,000-plus pages of adrenaline-spiked prose, and the third, Mississippi Blood, debuted at the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
From that pinnacle, what next? Where to turn after Penn Cage has dragged every skeleton out of Natchez’ historical closet?

Apparently, Iles decided to get out of town.

His newest, Cemetery Road, is set in the fictional town of Bienville, seat of Tenisaw County on the Mississippi and a piece up the road from Natchez. Like many river towns, Bienville has seen its glory days come and go; the town is shrinking from “a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease.” That is, until a group of local big shots lure a Chinese paper corporation to town. Their proposed mill will bring billions of dollars to the area and give Bienville a shot at a new life.

But—as happens in Iles’ work—history complicates the present. The site designated for the prospective mill lies atop a trove of Native American artifacts dating back centuries. The moral imperative to preserve these relics butts up against civic progress and private greed. Soon the tension erupts into bitter—and murderous—conflict.

Watching it all come to a boil is Marshall McEwan, a native son who has achieved fame as a Washington journalist but returned home to reconcile with his dying father, owner of The Watchman, Bienville’s newspaper. Soon Marshall is investigating the story of his career—a web of corruption more intricate than any he saw in D.C., right in the sleepy small town of his youth.

Turns out the old boys of Bienville are a good deal more organized and nefarious than Marshall or his newsman father ever thought. Though everything is kept “smooth on the surface, in the Southern tradition,” the Bienville Poker Club has been calling the shots in town since Reconstruction. The Club fully intends for the paper mill to become a reality, no matter the collateral damage. And they have augmented their post-Confederate ranks with ties to the New Jersey mob, courtesy of the town’s riverboat casino. The old boys now have connections to made guys.

Iles dials the tension up higher. Marshall is not long back in his hometown before he runs into his first love, Jet, and begins an affair with her. That Jet is now married to Paul Matheson, a classmate of them both and Marshall’s childhood friend, only deepens the betrayal. And the cost of discovery is high: Paul is a Special Ops veteran of the Middle East conflict and heir apparent to his father’s seat in the Poker Club.

It is impossible to tell more without revealing secrets of an intricate plot where the intrigue is as thick as kudzu and grows at twice the speed. Iles works tension into each page, a threat materializing from every quarter as Marshall digs deeper into the Club’s dealings and his own past. Iles seems to have learned how to squeeze all the menace and suspense of his Natchez trilogy into a single, standalone novel.

But what is best to see in Cemetery Road is that while Iles may have moved on from Natchez, he has retained the melancholic tone and long view of history that made his trilogy an important meditation on Southern history. “I think it’s probably best to leave the past in the past,” Marshall says in a rare moment of surrender. To which an older, wiser Mississippian replies, “If only we could.”

Novelist Matthew Guinn is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University, and the author of The Resurrectionist and The Scribe.

Lemuria has selected Cemetery Road as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

A life spared amid a reign of terror in Lovejoy Boteler’s ‘Crooked Snake’

By Guest Author

On March 13, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Southern History

By Charlie Spillers. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10)

“I don’t know how many people were kidnapped in Mississippi in 1968, but I was one of them,” writes author Lovejoy Boteler in the first sentence of the Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard. Kidnapped at 18 by murderous escaped convicts, Boteler pens a fascinating account of the life and crimes of one of his kidnappers, Albert Lepard. In this remarkable book the author puts readers in the minds of convicts, lawmen, and dozens of victims. He takes us along on desperate escapes, intense manhunts, and lives scarred by crimes Lepard committed.

Sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of an elderly woman, Albert Lepard escaped from prison six times in 14 years. During one of those escapes, Lepard kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, stuck a gun in his ribs, and forced him to drive Lepard and another escaped convict from Grenada to Memphis. During the trip, young Botelor’s quick thinking averted an armed robbery and possibly another murder.

In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer’s life using historical records and personal interviews with ex-convicts who ran with Lepard, family members who sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the lawmen who hunted him, and the people he victimized.

When he conducted interviews for the book Boteler established rapport with fellow victims and elicited their chilling stories. They are bound by common horror and experiences with the same cold-blooded killer. John Nellum was ten years old when Lepard and two other escaped convicts broke into his home, tied up John, his 12-year old brother and their father, and held them for several hours. Lying face down with his hands bound, John was sure he was going to die. His heart felt like it would leap out of his chest as Lepard pressed the barrel of a rifle against the father’s head.

“I got ninety-nine years and one dark Sunday and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to me if I blow your head off right now,” Lepard declared as he placed his finger on the trigger.

Decades later, John still struggles with the memory of being tied up when he was ten. “What a crapshoot,” the author thought after interviewing John. “His psyche had been indelibly seared at the tender age of ten. At least I had been eighteen when I met Lepard.” Like 10-year old John Nellum, the then 18-year old Boteler faced pure evil and thought he was going to die during his intense encounter with Lepard.

Seventy-four year old Mary Young was not so fortunate. Lepard and Joe Edwards went to her home where they tied and blindfolded her. They pistol-whipped her and demanded she tell them where money was hidden in the house. When she refused to talk, Lepard went into a blind fury. He grabbed a claw hammer, swung it wildly and hit her in the head. They threw her on a bed, still tied and blindfolded. She was gagged but they could hear her moans. After finding money, they poured kerosene on Mary and the bed, and lit it. Lepard and Edwards walked out and coldly counted their loot while the house was consumed by flames and Mary Young burned to death.

The author was seared by his own experiences while crammed together with Lepard and another convict in the cab of a pickup truck during that long trip to Memphis. He was sure he was going to die. Lepard not only spared his life, but performed a small act of kindness when they let him go. Boteler always wondered why Lepard let him live. Through his research, the author finally uncovered the likely reason and reveals it on the last page of the book.

Joe Edwards was convicted with Lepard of the murder of Mary Young. Writing of Edwards, who became a preacher, Boteler says, “In old age, he is a man who struggles with a past he cannot change–one that holds him fast and won’t let go.” The same is true for the author who has spent a lifetime living with a terrifying experience and wondering why a murderer spared him. Readers can be thankful it inspired him to write this compelling book.

Charlie Spillers is the bestselling author of Confessions of An Undercover Agent: Adventures, Close Calls and the Toll of a Double Life and Whirlwind: A Frank Marsh Novel, an international thriller. Flashpoint, the sequel to Whirlwind will be released later this year.

Author Q & A with Ken Wells

By Guest Author

On March 10, 2019

In Biography/Memoir, Southern Cooking, Southern Culture

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 10).

Louisiana native and journalist Ken Wells fondly recalls what he and his five brothers called “the gumbo life” in rural Bayou Black–a lifestyle lived close to the land and that meant he would not see the inside of a supermarket until he was nearly a teenager.

That phrase–Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou–is the title of his culinary memoir which not only details the history of gumbo, but recounts recent stories of its role in today’s culture and kitchens.

Wells left Bayou Black decades ago to travel around the world as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, and he has penned five novels of the Cajun bayous. Today, he lives in Chicago.

In Gumbo Life, you describe gumbo as “more than a delicious dish: it’s an attitude, a way of seeing the world.” What exactly is gumbo, and can you tell us briefly about its diverse history?

In Louisiana, gumbo’s predominant interpretation is a café-au-lait colored soup cooked with a roux–flour browned in butter, oil, or lard–and served over white rice. Typically, ingredients include chicken, sausage, shellfish, okra, and a combination of vegetables known as the Trinity: celery, bell pepper, and onion.

Food historians think gumbo is at least 250 years old, probably older. The first written mention dates to New Orleans in 1764, and shows a dish called “gumbo fillet” or what we now know as file’ gumbo, being cooked by West African slaves. The Africans arrived with word-of-mouth recipes for spicy okra-and-rice stews that are the likely template for the first gumbos. In fact, the Bantu dialect word for okra is “gombeau”–probably how gumbo got its name.

An 1804 account by a French journalist has gumbo being served at a party in the Cajun bayous of southeast Louisiana. That reference fueled the myth of gumbo as a Cajun invention. But the Canjuns have played a critical role in gumbo’s evolution, specifically the roux. The most compelling theory is that the Cajuns, using animal fats that were ubiquitous in colonial cooking–bear lard, in particular–deployed the roux with such skill and gusto that today it is rare to find gumbos cooked without a roux.

You state that when you and your five brothers were “living the gumbo life” in Louisiana in the late 1950s, gumbo was pretty much “a Cajun and Creole secret, a peasant dish.” Tell us about gumbo’s rise in popularity around the world.

When I left the bayous for graduate school in Missouri in 1975, nobody there had a clue what gumbo was. Two things–the breakout of Cajun/Zydeco music to a national and world stage and the post-’70s boom in Louisiana tourism–began to change that. The music fueled an interest in the culture that produced it and, hence, the food that nourished it. Gumbo is…the only truly indigenous regional cuisine in all of America; not just a dish but a style and a way of cooking.

Ken Wells

Gumbo has traveled in part because of what I call the Cajun Obligation. My momma not only taught me to cook gumbo, but taught me that if you cook gumbo, you are required to share the love.

As a journalist, I’ve traveled over much of the world. I’ve cooked gumbo for friends in London; Sydney, Australia; and Cape Town, South Africa. The reviews are always the same: “How can anything be this good? Can you show me how to cook it?” I came to realize I was only the vessel stirring the roux. It’s what I call the Gumbo Effect: the dish itself. Gumbo, if you just stick to the plan with love and attention, transforms itself into food magic.

Gumbo Life is a deeply personal family story about growing up in a rural Louisiana setting where food and family were paramount. Living in points around the world since then (and Chicago now), and looking back, is it almost hard to believe how different life was for you then, compared to now?

I feel blessed. When we moved to our little farm on the banks of Bayou Black in 1957, I felt the place was happily stranded in the previous century. My dad worked for a large sugarcane-farming operation that still kept a mule lot–not entirely trusting all the plowing to tractors. My brothers and I learned to swim in the bayou. We got our water from a cypress cistern. The sugar company owned thousands of acres of marshland, fields, and woodlands that we were free to roam, hunt, trap, and fish. My brothers and I were in the 4-H Club and raised chickens and pigs that we entered in the annual 4-H Club fair–and harvested for the pot.

Food was central. My mom cooked Cajun–not just gumbo but dishes such as sauce piquant and court-bouillon with ingredients like snapping turtle and redfish that we harvested ourselves. We ate well! We grew a huge garden. I don’t think I set foot in a supermarket until I was 12 or 13 years old. That’s because there weren’t any near-by.

You book is also a history of one of Louisiana’s greatest cultural and culinary offerings to the world, along with glimpses of current gumbo tales that emphasize its adaptability–not to mention that you’ve included a glossary of regional and culinary terms, a map of the Gumbo Belt and 10 recipes! What did it mean to you personally to write this “culinary memoir”?

I obviously love my gumbo and I felt a deep exploration of its roots and iterations was a good way to tell the wider story of our singular, food-centric culture. I say “our” even though I have not lived in the Gumbo Belt since 1975, my journalism career having compelled me to living in big cities far away. I think that living away has helped me see my roots in a way that I might not have seen them had I stayed.

I have two grown daughters who, now in their 30s, love Dad’s gumbo as much as I loved my mother’s. But their childhoods could not have been more different than mine. We moved among cosmopolitan cities, lived abroad, traveled widely. They will never lead the gumbo life as I lived it and so in a way my book was written for them–to remind them of their connections to a place where our roots run so deep.

Ken Wells will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, March 13, at 5:00 to sign copies of and discuss Gumbo Life. Lemuria has chosen Gumbo Life as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction.

Do the ‘Dead Man’s Float’ with us on March 26 to honor Jim Harrison

By Jamie

On March 7, 2019

In Poetry

If you stick around the store long enough, you’ll hear John talk about Jim Harrison. The average time span for this happening is 5.68 minutes. I’ve timed it.

And if you read any of Harrison’s work, especially, his poetry, you’ll understand why. It’s meditative, but not intimidating. Funny, but not flippant. In his last book, Dead Man’s Float, he thinks a lot about mortality—particularly his own—without being morbid. Let’s take a look at his short poem “Birds.”

The birds are flying around frantically
in the thunderstorm that just began, the
first in weeks and weeks. They are enjoying
themselves. I think I’ll join them.

I like this poem because of how much work it can do, depending on what you’re looking for. It can either be a lighthearted quick glimpse out of a window through which we see a storm-littered yard punctuated with birds playing and a grown man frolicking in a sort of second childhood. And/or/also, we can view Harrison’s signature focus on birds and landscapes as a longing for purity, for a spiritual weightlessness freed from the burdens of life itself: a mashup of Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers that perches on the soul” and Keats’ nightingale that sings because it doesn’t live in a space “Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.” These birds are boundless, and Harrison wants that same freedom. He’s welcoming flying from this earth. Again, as Dickinson says, “from the earth, the light balloon asks nothing but release.”

Jim Harrison knew he was dying when he wrote the poems in Dead Man’s Float. The grace with which he accepts his very end is comforting, but not all of the poems are about his life’s sunset. In another imitating-animals move, the poem “Mad Dog,” Harrison tells us that he “envied the dog lying in the yard,” so he lies down with it, rolling around, unable to find the same level of blissful comfort that his canine counterpart does. We’ve all been here: trying to make ourselves happy but blocked by ourselves. It’s funny, tongue in cheek, light.

On March 26, on the third anniversary of Jim Harrison’s death, fans of Harrison will gather at the bookstore and read aloud from Dead Man’s Float. Join us. You don’t have to read aloud, or even be an expert in poems. Show up and listen. Jim would approve.

Night Hunt
–for Jim Harrison

Through winter-thin trees,
an owl’s empty calls echoes.
No bird to be seen, but
in this near dusk, I hear it—
a clear tunnel of sound.

Branch-rustle and swoop,
the quiet snatch of talons
on ground. One less field
mouse. Silence. Then
the cold song resumes.

-Jamie Dickson

Page 12 of 257

Author Q & A with Tom Clavin

Tom Clavin’s ‘Wild Bill’ sets record straight on wild west gunfighter

James Meredith’s ‘Three Years in Mississippi’ receives a much needed reprint

Leaving Never Hurts as Much as Being Left Behind: Jeff Zentner’s ‘Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee’

Author Q & A with Peter Heller

Such Sweet Sorrow: ‘Lovely War’ by Julie Berry

New native son battles enemies, self in ‘Cemetery Road’ by Greg Iles

A life spared amid a reign of terror in Lovejoy Boteler’s ‘Crooked Snake’

Author Q & A with Ken Wells

Do the ‘Dead Man’s Float’ with us on March 26 to honor Jim Harrison

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