Tag: Greg Iles

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

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.

Author Q & A with Greg Iles

Interview by Jana Hoops. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (March 3). Click here to read this article on the Clarion-Ledger’s website.

In his first novel since the acclaimed Natchez Burning trilogy, Mississippian Greg Iles offers readers a crime thriller with a fresh setting, new characters and a whole new set of troubles–topped off with a bundle of family secrets that lead to another shocking Iles ending.

Cemetery Road introduces Marshall McEwan–a successful Washington, D.C. journalist returning to his hometown of fictional Bienville, Mississippi, to run the family’s newspaper in the wake of his father’s illness. In a story of love, betrayal, corruption, and, of course, murder, the bonds of family and romantic interests are tested beyond a breaking point–all keeping McEwan a very busy man.

The author of 15 New York Times bestsellers, Iles has seen his novels made into films and published in more than 35 countries. He is a longtime member of the “lit-rock” group The Rock Bottom Remainders, and lives in Natchez with his wife and has three children.

What was it like switching gears and sitting down to write your first novel since the Penn Cage trilogy?

Greg Iles

I really needed a break from the travails of the Cage family, and from the worst years of the civil rights struggle. My readers probably do, too. The Natchez Burning trilogy took me the better part of 10 years to write, and I nearly died (in a serious car accident) in 2011 while trying to finish the first volume.

Cemetery Road is just as intense as the trilogy in some ways, but it focuses less on race, and more on the secrets hidden in marriages and extended families. The secret at the heart of this book is pretty shocking, I think, but I don’t want to say more than that.

The plot of Cemetery Road is filled with danger, crime and surprises–not to mention many regrettable relationships–in the fictitious river town of Bienville, with main character Marshall McEwen in the thick of it. How would you describe his personality (given his past tragedies and his relationship with his father), and the tumultuous events he faces on a daily basis?

As for Marshall McEwan, I think a lot of people can relate to him. He left the small town he grew up in, worked hard for success and fame, yet now he must return home to care for a dying father he’s barely spoken to in 30 years.

That’s the chief difference between Marshall and Penn Cage (in the Natchez Burning trilogy). Penn and Tom Cage loved and respected each other all their lives, but Marshall and his father were driven apart by a family tragedy when Marshall was only 14. Marshall’s father blames him for that tragedy–unfairly. I think.

Marshall returns to Mississippi more to help his mother than to care for his father, but I think we want father and son to find a way to reconcile before the end, because Marshall got a lot of his strength and stubbornness from his dad. And he needs every bit of it to handle the SOBs he faces in Cemetery Road.

Are there any threads of truth (from Mississippi or elsewhere) that were the basis for the goings-on of the Bienville group known as the Poker Club in Cemetery Road?

The Bienville Poker Club absolutely grew out of stories I heard as a boy growing up in Natchez, and from talking to Mississippians from many walks of life. The people who run small Southern towns are rarely those in the official power structure. Always been that way, and probably always will be.

As Robert Penn Warren knew, corruption is deeply ingrained in our lives, even in the human spirit. And in all politics, sadly… money talks louder than anything else.

Is it possible that we will hear from Marshall McEwan again? Perhaps a sequel or a brand new direction for McEwan. Or, can you tell us of any other ideas you may be working on for your next book?

You may well hear from Marshall again. I’ve been working behind the scenes in Mississippi politics for about three years, and that’s given me some great ideas. I also have a very twisty noir story that’s perfect for Marshall and for Nadine Sullivan, another new character in Cemetery Road.

Another ambitious book tour has claimed your schedule for the month of March–with 27 stops in 19 days!–and once again with the kickoff in Mississippi cities. Tell me about the tour.

I’m always conflicted about my book tours. I like staying home on my country place. Racing to two or three cities a day for a month will wear you out quick. But it’s the only time I get out among my readers, and I always have some wonderful experiences out there. Some people travel a long way to get to my book signings, and I try to give them a great talk, as well as visit with them a bit.

Greg Iles will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 5, at 3:30 p.m. to sign copies of Cemetery Road. The reading will begin at 5:30 p.m. Lemuria has selected Cemetery Road as its March 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Fiction.

The Penance of Penn Cage: ‘Mississippi Blood’ by Greg Iles

by Andrew Hedglin

mississippi bloodGreg Iles is set to publish his final chapter in the Natchez Burning trilogy tomorrow. The trilogy, which began with Natchez Burning in 2014 and continued with The Bone Tree in 2015, will conclude with Mississippi Blood. The whole trilogy is set in the Natchez, Mississippi, of long-running Iles protagonist Penn Cage, who first appeared in The Quiet Game in 1999. (The trilogy also features appearances from characters in the previously stand-alone and unrelated thriller Dead Sleep from 2001).

I personally first encountered the character of Penn Cage about four years ago on the pages of his second novel, Turning Angel. Penn became the latest in my personal parade of literary types that I treasure: the non-professional private eye. He followed Lawrence Block’s book-loving burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, John D. MacDonald’s legendary beach-bum Travis McGee, and Rick Riordan’s now-forgotten tequila-drinking, tai chi-practicing English professor Tres Navarre.  But Penn hit closer to home, quite literally. At the time, I was working just over the Mississippi River and a little north of Natchez, in Tensas (pronounced Ten-SAW) Parish in Louisiana.

And that’s the thing about these characters: they inevitably become inseparable from their settings. Penn lives and breathes Natchez like its sins and successes are wholly his burden to bear. natchez & riverIt the middle of Turning Angel, he makes a pitch for his out-of-town fiancée to stay while he makes a run for mayor of Natchez: “Natchez has become a place where we have to raise our children to live elsewhere. Our kids can’t come back here and make a living. And that’s a tragedy…I want to change that.” And those words resonate because what’s true for Natchez is essentially true for all of Mississippi.

And this is what has always been at stake for Penn. Since moving home from Houston after the death of his wife, Penn has striven to make a idyllic home life for his daughter Annie, much like the one that his father, Dr. Thomas Cage, had given to him when he was a boy. For the first three books of the series (The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, The Devil’s Punchbowl), Dr. Cage is made out to be a veritable saint, completely devoid of the prejudice that plagues the Natchez community all around him, giving freely his time, medical expertise, and perhaps most importantly, his respect to the surrounding black community.

The façade starts to crumble at the beginning of the first book of this trilogy, Natchez Burning. Dr. Cage is charged with the recent murder of his trusted black nurse from the 1960s, Viola Turner. Her death quickly becomes enmeshed with the murderous activities of a white supremacist terror cell, the Double Eagles, and their drug-running descendants. (The real-life inspiration for the Double Eagles, known as the Silver Dollar Group, is chronicled brilliantly in Stanley Nelson’s harrowing true-life book Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s).

In telling Viola’s story (and Dr. Cage’s, and Natchez’s), Natchez Burning (and its sequel The Bone Tree) go to some wild places, such as post-Katrina reconstruction in New Orleans and the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas, of all things. sheriff-cooley-oTruly menacing villains such as Brody Royal, the money man behind the Klan, and Forrest Knox, the heir apparent to all law enforcement in Louisiana and simultaneously the head of the family crime syndicate, dominate the first two books, but are dispatched. By the telling of Mississippi Blood, only Snake Knox (Forrest’s uncle), the man with the meanest of goals—survival and notoriety—and the meanest of dispositions, survives to torment Penn and the good people left standing in Natchez.

Mississippi Blood moves at a slightly less frenetic pace than its predecessors (it would almost have to), but it simmers with the same tension. We—and the courtroom spectators of Natchez—are finally promised answers about Dr. Cage’s activities that have been lingering for years. Also lurking at the edges of Penn’s conscience and consciousness at all times is his half-brother Lincoln Turner, the illegitimate son of Dr. Thomas Cage and Viola Turner. Lincoln may be Penn’s antagonist, but he’s not exactly a villain, even from Penn’s point-of-view. Lincoln is seeking reparation for the disparity of his and Penn’s life in a way that Penn finds almost impossible to pay. Penn has even turned ambivalent about his father’s liberty, blaming him for a tragedy at the end of The Bone Tree, which was truly shocking and heart-rending in a way that is only possible for readers like me after hundreds of pages and dozens of hours spent with the same people.

But, above all, Penn is trying to hold down a peace for family, facing down a dark past before even thinking about a brighter future, determined to see it all the way down to the end. Because while the “Mississippi Blood” of the title may be evocative of all the violence that has taken place in the trilogy, it ultimately refers to the survival instinct of those who possess it running through their veins.

Greg Iles will be at Lemuria on Tuesday, March 21. He will begin signing books at 3:00 and read from Mississippi Blood at 5:30.

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