Authors Review Books – Lemuria Books

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By Patrick O’Daniel. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (August 11)

Karen Abbott expertly weaves a story of ambition, treachery, and revenge in her new book The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America. Drawing from court testimonies, newspapers, and other first-hand accounts, Abbott details the rise and fall George Remus, the so-called “King of the Bootleggers.”

The Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banned the sale and transportation of most alcoholic beverages in the United States. George Remus, a successful defense attorney in the Midwest, represented many bootleggers arrested for violating the law. He was amazed at how easily his clients paid exorbitant court costs and fines. Intrigued by the profit potential in bootlegging, he studied the prohibition law, discovered its loopholes, and found a way to cash in on the liquor business.

Remus found that millions of gallons of liquor remained in bonded warehouses after prohibition went into effect. The only way the owners could legally get rid of it was to sell their stock to drug companies who in turn sold the liquor as prescription medicine. Remus saw an opportunity and decided to buy both distilleries and drug companies to become both buyer and seller.

Remus falsified or destroyed records of shipments, and had crews from his trucking company divert liquor to a fortified safe-house in rural Ohio where they sold it illegally. Remus bribed law enforcement to avoid arrest as he bought more distilleries, warehouses, and pharmacies. He lived a lavish lifestyle reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and made millions at a time when the average salary was less than $2000 per year.

Abbott goes into detail about Remus’s business operations and the men that worked for him. She recounts the hijacking that led Remus to use armed convoys and a fortified safe-house. She describes how easily a rich bootlegger could corrupt poorly paid law enforcement and how hard it was for honest prohibition agents to do their jobs. On one occasion, Remus’s lieutenant George Conners expertly cajoled a couple of prohibition agents with whiskey and money after the two nearly discovered the operation. Every decision described sheds more light on Remus’s character.

Abbott also brings to light Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the crusading Assistant Attorney General who wanted Remus behind bars. The story takes a bizarre turn when Agent Frank Dodge, the man Willebrandt sent to investigate Remus, and Remus’s wife Imogene became lovers and conspired to steal his fortune. Their treachery would not only bring about Remus’s ruin but their own as well.
Abbott’s colorful settings and intricate relationships make the book read like a novel, but always with an eye on historical accuracy. She inserts excerpts of court testimony as epigraphs to set the stage as events unfold. Eyewitnesses recount personal observations, motivations, and secret plots. The details help the reader see the conspiracies take shape against Remus, his downfall, and what brought him to seek revenge.

Abbott captures the feel of the Jazz Age and its gangsters, scofflaws, and crusaders in this story. The Ghosts of Eden Park is a well-researched and highly engaging work filled with intrigue, infidelity, murder, and headline-catching courtroom drama. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Prohibition Era, including fans of Prohibition by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

Patrick O’Daniel is the Executive Director of Libraries for Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis and author of Crusaders, Gangsters, and Whiskey: Prohibition in Memphis, When the Levee Breaks: Memphis and the Mississippi Valley Flood of 1927, Memphis and the Super Flood of 1937: High Water Blues, and co-author of Historic Photos of Memphis.

Lemuria has chosen The Ghosts of Eden Park as its August 2019 selection for its First Editions Club for Nonfiction. Signed first editions are available in store and on our website.

Finally art, life of Mississippi’s Dusti Bongé celebrated in lushly illustrated biography

By Guest Author

On July 24, 2019

In Art/Photography, Southern Culture

By William Dunlap. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 21)

I can objectively say that this is one of the most sumptuous and satisfying books that has ever been my pleasure to hold and read. It is as profound as it is long overdue.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me state that I know Rick Gruber, and I know him to be a scholar of the first order who has at his command more information about art of a southern nature than anyone alive. It is also worth noting that his prose is infinitely readable, unlike so many of those who write about art in a scholarly fashion.

I also know Paul Bongé, grandson of Dusti and son of Lyle, who like his father is a terrific photographer, sailor, builder, waterman and keeper of the family faith and tradition on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Lyle Bongé, Dusti’s son, was a fine friend who I came to know through the poet/publisher Jonathan Williams. The two were both alumni of Black Mountain College and lifelong collaborators. The Sleep of Reason, Lyle’s book published by Jonathan Williams’ Jargon Society Press, contains photographs of New Orleans Mardi Gras from the 1950s and says more than we really want to know about our people, time, and place.

I met Dusti Bongé toward the end of her life, and recall a memorable studio visit. She was working with pure pigment and fiberglass to create her Windows that were a part of her last exhibition at the Betty Parsons gallery. They contained rich colors that were, at the time, hard to love but it was easy to see her mastery of the medium and why the New York School, a.k.a. Betty Parsons et al., were devoted to her.

Dusti Bongé Art and Life is published by the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation. The book was designed by Philip Collier of New Orleans and distributed by the University Press of Mississippi. This lavishly illustrated tome of some 350 pages with 500 illustrations was four plus years in the making and accompanies the Ogden Museum of Southern Art exhibition, “Piercing the Inner Wall: The Art of Dusti Bongé’” curated by Bradley Sumrall. This exhibition will come to the Mississippi Museum of Art in the fall of 2020.

Many of the very telling photographs included in this book are by Jack Robinson, the internationally known and enigmatic photographer from the Mississippi Delta who is worthy of further study and serious scrutiny.

All of this begs the rhetorical question: Why has it taken so long?

It is inexplicable that this most accomplished and recognized woman who was with us from 1903 until 1993, mainly in Mississippi but sometimes in New Orleans and New York, and yet has all but fallen through the proverbial cracks.
For a place like Mississippi that is so obsessed with its native sons (could this be a reason?) to overlook this remarkable artist for so long is a question that wants to be addressed.

While New York and New Orleans are discussed in depth, it’s Biloxi and the Mississippi Gulf Coast that come in for the most revealing and substantive writing and research. In addition to chronicling a life, art, and sense of place, this book is also a profound social history of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and exploration of the extraordinary pull of this place for artists like George Ohr and the Walter Anderson family.

That the Gulf Coast has more in common with New Orleans than it does with say Tupelo hardly comes as a surprise, but it helps explain the complexities of a place like Mississippi.

William Faulkner once said that in order “to understand the world you need to understand a place like Mississippi.”

Rick Gruber’s book, Dusti Bongé: Art and Life answers many of these questions and helps us understand much, much more.

William Dunlap is a painter, writer and native son of Webster County. His first collection of stories , Short Mean Fiction is soon to be followed by Lying and Making a Living. He will talk about that and his book from University Press Of Mississippi, Pappy Kitchens and the Saga of Red Eye the Rooster at the Mississippi Book Festival, August 17.

Richard Gruber will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant (along with William Dunlap) in the “Southern Art” panel at 1:30 p.m. in State Capitol Room 204.

‘Conversations with Gary Snyder’ reveals prophetic Zen mind rooted in North American earth

By Guest Author

On July 9, 2019

In Poetry, Zen

By Frank LaRue Owen. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (July 7)

Some writers move, inspire, or entertain their readers. Other writers create movements of conscience and spark poetic consciousness in whole generations of people that follow them. Gary Snyder is of the latter feather.

In Conversations with Gary Snyder, we are offered a rare glimpse into the inner life of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet through twenty-one interviews from different phases of his esteemed career. Like an archaeological dig that gently brushes away the dust of years to reveal the storied bones of life and culture, the masterful curation of these insightful conversations from different chapters of Snyder’s life reveals a gleaming thread of topics that aren’t just relevant to American literature, but—even five decades later in some cases—are themes that remain deeply pertinent to the times we’re living through.

Readers will find that many of the collected interviews grapple with subjects that require us to look in the mirror at who we are as a society. In this way, the book is not merely about a poet or his poems, but is, all-at-once, a cultural history, an ecological indictment, and a disturbingly visionary statement in the psychological, sociological, and futuristic sense.

Those already familiar with Gary Snyder are in for a real treat. Devotees of his poetry are no strangers to the subtle “fragrances” that hover like incense in the background of his writings. Gathered at the periphery of a Snyder poem or essay, or scampering right through the middle of one, we encounter Pacific Northwest Coast native lore, a flash of Buddhism, stirrings of deep ecological empathy, or an outright protest about the Western world’s assault on the natural world. All of these subjects, and more, rush forward on full display as major features in the interviews editor David Stephen Calonne has compiled.

From his enshrined place within early American Beat poetry (the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums was modeled after Snyder) to his eloquent articulation of his writing process as stemming from an obviously Zen-trained body-mind integration, what may have once been an understated personality silhouette for some readers of Snyder emerges full-force as a three-dimensional profile of an American national treasure.

In each of the interviews—ranging from sources as diverse as Newsweek, Shambhala Sun magazine, an interview at Naropa University’s Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and a truly fascinating dialogue from the late ’60s between philosopher Alan Watts, poet Allen Ginsberg, psychedelic proponent Timothy Leary, and Snyder—we come face to face with the mind-essence of an authentic American Zen man, who is also known to some by his dharma name Chofu (“Listen to the Wind”).

The end result can only be a singular conclusion. Snyder is of a rare breed; a veteran “psychonaut” (explorer of consciousness and the spirit of place). In this way, a refreshing portrait is offered of a searingly awake person, born in the U.S. but truly liberated from the constraints, blind spots, spiritual impediments, and cultural biases of mindless consumerism and the modern Judeo-Christian worldview.

Even more important, by the time readers of this work reach the final pages, they will receive the distilled benefits of Snyder’s lifelong journey in the form of an invitation; to be more at home in one’s own skin, to hold an allegiance to the deeper story flowing beneath our troubled national psyche, to be conscious that we all belong to a sacred reality we need desperately to remember—a planetary citizenship that thinks of humanity and nature as one extended family.

Frank LaRue Owen is a Mississippi native, an alumnus of Naropa University, and the author of three books of poetry, The School of Soft-Attention,The Temple of Warm Harmony, and the forthcoming 2020 release Stirrup of the Sun & Moon. He will be a panelist in the upcoming Mississippi Book Festival, August 17, 2019, at the Mississippi State Capitol.

‘Life Between the Levees’ unleashes powerful legacy of American river commerce

By Guest Author

On June 3, 2019

In Southern Culture, Southern History

By Lovejoy Boteler. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (June 2)

One summer in my twenties I worked as a deckhand on the Greenville, a towboat that plied the upper Mississippi River from Alton, Illinois to Davenport, Iowa. In that short span of time I came to understand the tremendous power of the river and the importance of its commerce. Melody Golding’s superb book, Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots, with its countless tales of adventure and antics on “brown water” transported me straight back to that time.

Golding is uniquely qualified to have compiled Life Between the Levees. She states in the first line of the introduction, “I come from a river family.” With that simple but powerful statement, she hints at the soul of the river as it can only be revealed by the folks who have an intimate connection with that life. Her deep love for the river comes through, and must have fueled her passion to create this comprehensive work. She has given us a book with beautiful documentary photographs, both personal and archival, and authentic stories told by colorful characters, many of whom she has known.

For ten years, with single-minded purpose, Golding of Vicksburg traveled thousands of miles on the Mississippi and its inland waterways to record over one hundred voices and stories of brown water mariners: steely-eyed captains, pilots, deckhands, cooks, and chaplains, some of whom have now passed from the scene. Her interviews reveal events that occurred over a seventy-year span of time. Older captains who were trained by the legendary pilots of the great paddle wheelers of the nineteenth century provide poignant, provocative and sometimes hilarious insights. Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots captures a slice of history that is destined to become an important and lasting part of American folklore.

Sometime the call of the river came at an early age. Joy Mary Manthey, from Louisiana, remembers steering a towboat as a young girl. “I had to stand on the milk crate to see over the wheel, and I steered the boat. I loved it. I mean…I was only ten years old.” After some interesting life adventures, Joy Mary became a nun, and then a towboat chaplain.

Perry Wolfe remembered his first experience on the river as a young boy. His dad called him “his first mate.” He slept on sandbars. Perry soon realized that his life would forever be on the river. He would eventually become a deckhand with Brent Towing, out of Greenville and talked about how life on the river was in the old days. “Actually up there at Lock 26, it was more wild than Natchez Under the Hill … being a captain back then was a lot harder because you had to referee all the fights.”

Captain William Torner, on old-timer, recalled the steamboats of yesteryear. “I am one of the few river men still living who has worked on a steamboat built in the 1800s”. In 1940 Captain Torner worked on the Reliance out of Pittsburgh.

The Mississippi River and its tributaries have influenced the shape of the collective psyche of America through Mark Twain’s tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and now with Melody Golding’s seminal book, the voices of modern-day captains and crews.

The river is a place where a person can find peace. Patrick Soileau, thirty years on the waterways summed it up. “…it’s your time for solitude…I could probably solve the world’s problems up here.”
In Life Between the Levees: America’s Riverboat Pilots, through captivating interviews, Melody Golding chronicles stories of hope and pathos, friendship and sometimes disaster, away from the bustling world of landlubbers. Life Between the Levees is a book to be savored and enjoyed for years to come.

Lovejoy Boteler is author of Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard published by University Press of Mississippi. He lives in Jackson.

Melody Golding will appear at the Mississippi Book Festival August 17 as a participant in the “Mississippi: The Delta” panel at 9:30 a.m. at the State Capitol Room 201 A.

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.

John M. Floyd’s ‘The Barrens’ is full of surprises

By Guest Author

On October 30, 2018

In Mystery, Short Stories, Southern Fiction

By J.C. Patterson. Special to the Mississippi Book Page

Well, the season is upon us: hundreds of hungry children dressing up like princesses and superheroes, anticipating candy by the truckload. But my treat came early in the form of John M. Floyd’s seventh exciting collection of mystery short stories. The Barrens contains thirty tales set mainly in the south, some in different time periods. But they all have zingers of a punch line.

In Floyd’s opening volley, “The Sandman,” the owner of a diner is being forced to close by nefarious mobsters. One of her patrons gets a double shot of revenge through his deceased friend’s help.

An escaped prisoner uses a one-armed fisherman as his hostage in “Crow Mountain.” But where will the old man lead the escapee? “Trails End” features an out of the way café that caters to murder, a returning sheriff and some suspicious circus folk.

Thugs confront an elderly man in a protection for hire scheme in the clever “Safety First.” Watch out for what the old fellow has up his sleeve. Set in New Orleans, “Dawson’s Curse” drums up some villainous voodoo that backfires on its owner. “Merrill’s Run” traps a man in the trunk of a car with a very unexpected outcome.

The middle section of “The Barrens” makes way for six chuckle-worthy short stories in Floyd’s “Law And Daughter” series. Featuring small town sheriff Lucy Valentine and her crime-solving mom Fran, these snappy stories convey some of the author’s most fun efforts.

In “Flu Season,” a talented knife thrower with a cold aims to keep his blades true when his wife is the target. An ex-gunslinger investigates a 22-year old murder in “Gunwork.” Another period piece, “Rooster Creek” would make a sure-fire movie, in which a young woman returns to her childhood home, only to find it inhabited by true evil.

“Pit Stop,” my personal favorite, tells a double tale of a mother defending her kids in the present while recounting a chilling narrative of how she became so brave.
A killer on the run with a fear of snakes confronts his worst nightmare in “The Blue Delta.” One of the shortest stories ever written, “Premonition” casts a shadow on a couple getting ready for an evening at the theatre. A deadly west coast virus threatens a family’s happy vibes in “Life Is Good.” A mom minding her daughter’s store must make a harrowing decision in “Rosie’s Choice.”

In one of Floyd’s strangest stories ever, “The Red Eye To Boston,” an old man tells a fellow passenger that there’s something in the bathroom in the back of the plane they’re on. And it isn’t extra toilet paper.

The finale takes two children into The Barrens, a dark haunted woodland featuring a vengeful stepfather, monsters and a witch who will surprise them all.
Be sure to grab this creepy, fast, violent, mischievous, clever and fun collection of some of John M. Floyd’s finest short stories. Each tale in The Barrens is like popping Halloween candy into your mouth. Savor these tasty tidbits of mystery gold.

J.C. Patterson is the author of Big Easy Dreamin’ and Mo’ Dreamin’.

John M. Floyd will be at Lemuria tonight on Tuesday, October 30, at 5:00 to sign and read from The Barrens.

John Grisham gives a Faulknerian flavor to ‘The Reckoning’

By Guest Author

On October 23, 2018

In Mystery, Southern Fiction

By Matthew Guinn. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (October 21)

At this point in his long and bestselling career, John Grisham’s chief competition is himself. How to top the breakout sensations of A Time to Kill or The Firm? How to set the bar higher than the dozens of blockbusters that have followed? It would appear that Grisham has no mountains yet to climb.

But in The Reckoning, he seems to have found a new challenge to expand his achievement: to charge right into the territory of the Old Man of Southern literature himself, fellow Mississippian William Faulkner.

Grisham does so with a novel stuffed with all the elements of Faulknerian tragedy: family secrets, a buried history, illicit sex, race, and bloody retribution. It makes for a heady mix.

Fitting, then, that this ambitious challenge returns Grisham to the Mississippi setting of A Time to Kill and Sycamore Row, fleshing out his fictional Ford County after the manner of Faulkner’s Yoknopatawpha.

The Reckoning opens with an episode that seems inspired by Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Decorated WWII veteran Pete Banning, home from the Pacific theater, strides into the office of the Methodist minister who’d counseled his wife while he was missing and presumed dead, and shoots him in cold blood. Banning surrenders himself to the police, but is otherwise uncooperative. Under repeated questionings, his response never varies: “I have nothing to say.”

Banning is, for the first hundred pages or so, one of the least sympathetic protagonists conceivable—he is to all appearances a laconic, cold-blooded killer. But Pete’s war service, it is revealed, involves a backstory that belies that facade.

And what a backstory it is. The novel reaches its full pitch in part two, “The Boneyard,” where we learn all that Pete endured through his service in the Pacific. Astutely researched, “The Boneyard” reads like a novella of the Bataan Death March, Japanese prison camps, and guerrilla warfare in the Pacific Theater. We learn that Pete was a true hero, a patriot, and a loyal friend to his comrades at arms. He not only endures the war atrocities of the Japanese, he prevails.

Pete returns stateside to convalesce from his war wounds, stoic and tight-lipped about his imprisonment. But if Pete thought he had escaped a living hell in the Pacific, he finds that back in Ford County another, more domestic hell has been brewing in his absence. Within a few months, he has committed his wife Liza to Whitfield, deeded the family farm to his children, and murdered the Reverend Dexter Bell.

Pete faces execution for his crime and does nothing to aid in his defense. With Pete not talking, it is up to the Banning children and their Aunt Florry to cipher his motives.

Not much else can be told about the story without revealing several major plot twists. Suffice it to say that a buried history of sex and madness emerges—and that Grisham keeps the revelations coming to the last page. The disintegration of the Banning family at times reads like Job’s saga. Several deaths occur and one of them, toward the novel’s conclusion, is among the finest scenes Grisham has written.

Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor once said that Faulkner’s towering presence in Southern literature “makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” In The Reckoning, Grisham’s engagement with the Dixie Limited is as inspiring as it is bold. That engagement has produced a page-turner of literary caliber not often seen at the top of bestseller lists.

The Reckoning has also expanded the scope of what we can expect of the Grisham novels to come. One hopes that this most prominent of living Mississippi writers will continue to explore Ford County and demonstrate that the tropes of family, community, and history are still fertile ground.

“Hearing the truth is like grabbing smoke in our family,” one of the Banning children says toward the end of the novel. In The Reckoning, Grisham has not only grabbed smoke, but bottled it. What a pleasure it is to see him expand the “postage stamp” of his fictional soil.

Novelist Matthew Guinn is associate professor of creative writing at Belhaven University.

John Grisham’s The Reckoning is one of Lemuria’s November 2018 selections for its First Editions Club for Fiction. Signed first editions are available here.

William Boyle’s ‘Gravesend’ dazzles with depth of characters

By Guest Author

On September 24, 2018

In Mystery

By John M. Floyd. Special to the Clarion-Ledger Sunday print edition (September 9)

When failed actress Allesandra Biagini returns from Los Angeles to her Brooklyn neighborhood following the death of her mother, she finds that nothing much has changed in the past eleven years: it’s still a place she both loves and hates. And that’s a feeling shared by most of the people she knows.

Gravesend is a glum, gritty, depressing place on the wrong side of the Brooklyn tracks—but it’s also an old, close-knit neighborhood with a small-town feel, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s business.

What the gossips don’t know is that Conway D’Innocenzio, one of Allesandra’s former classmates and the stock boy at the local Rite Aid, is planning a murder. Sixteen years ago, troublemaker Ray Boy Calabrese was convicted of the hate-crime killing of Conway’s brother, and now that Ray Boy’s been released from prison, Conway intends to get even.

The problem is, he finds that he can’t bring himself to do the deed, even after years of nursing the grudge, and it’s this cowardly failure to act—along with the fact that the regretful Ray Boy no longer seems to be a threat to anyone—that forms the basis of the plot.

Other players include Eugene Calabrese, a troubled fifteen-year-old who idolizes his Uncle Ray Boy and fancies himself a gangster; sweet but reclusive Stephanie Dirello, who has always admired Allesandra and secretly longs for Conway; and bartender Amy Falconetti, a Flushing native and Allesandra’s love interest, who also appears in Boyle’s recent novel The Lonely Witness. There’s even a local mob boss, Enzio Natale, and his deadly henchmen.

Nothing about any of these people is predictable, and it’s a testament to Boyle’s talent that by the end of the novel most of their lives intersect in a way that’s both perfect and unexpected.

William Boyle’s writing has been compared to that of Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane, and for good reason. Similarities include a mastery of setting, pitch-perfect dialogue, and detailed, suspenseful plotting.

Gravesend has all of these, but its biggest strength probably lies in the depth of its characters and the fact that there is so much conflict at every turn, and on many levels: dead-end jobs, discrimination, dysfunctional families, broken dreams, and of course the ever-present street crime and violence. And the neighborhood itself plays a huge part in the story.

In one paragraph we’re given a look at it through the eyes of Allesandra, on her way home: “She strained to see down to the avenue. Old ladies with shopping carts. Chinese men blowing on hot coffee in doorways. Others with plastic bags, talking on cell phones, texting, looking down. The sidewalks were wet where storeowners had hosed them down. Garbage flitted around, paper bags and rotten fruit, and she swore she could smell it all the way up in the train.”

In this novel Boyle has given us the best of all literary worlds: complex characters, a gripping story, and an elegance of language not often found in crime fiction. In addition, it’s a story that portrays Italian-Americans in a way that seems far more real and believable than what we’re accustomed to seeing on the page and the screen—probably because Boyle is himself a product of the neighborhood where the book is set, and knows it so well.

At its core, Gravesend is a realistic and compulsively readable story of mean streets, neighborhood bars, wanna-be gangsters, former schoolmates, revenge killers, Italian and Russian mobsters, and working-class people struggling to survive.

It’s a powerful novel, one that the reader will remember long after it’s finished.

John M. Floyd is an Edgar Award nominee and the author of the upcoming book The Barrens. He and his wife Carolyn live in Brandon.

William Boyle will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, September 26, at 5:00 to sign and read from Gravesend.

Two of Will Campbell’s memoirs create balm for healing, love

By Guest Author

On May 29, 2018

In Biography/Memoir, Religion, Southern Culture

By Carter Dalton Lyon. Special to the Clarion-Leger Sunday print edition (May 20)

On this Pentecost Sunday, when believers mark the arrival of the Holy Spirit that empowered the apostles to go forth and proclaim the good news of the Gospel, we would be well served in examining the words of one of God’s more modern-day disciples, Reverend Will D. Campbell. It has been nearly five years since Brother Will’s passing, but his wit and wisdom are as needed now as they have ever been.

Even if you are familiar with Rev. Campbell or one of his seventeen books, I would encourage you to revisit them. Thankfully, the University Press of Mississippi has just published new editions of his two memoirs: Brother to a Dragonfly, which first came out in 1977 and contains new forewords from longtime friends Jimmy Carter and John Lewis, and Forty Acres and a Goat, which was first published in 1986.

The books chronicle Rev. Campbell’s life from his upbringing in Amite County, Mississippi, to his time as a pastor and mentor to civil rights activists, though they are really books about who we are and how we relate to others, whether they are family members, friends, adversaries, or yes, a goat. During an era in which he shaped historical change, he is more interested in explaining how we are shaped by the personal bonds with those around us and how vital it is to seek out those connections.

Few books could justifiably be called game-changers, but Brother to a Dragonfly was one for me when I first read it in college. It covers his formative years through the height of the civil rights movement as he became, in his words, a self-satisfied white southern liberal. You meet those, like his grandfather, the son of a Confederate soldier, who introduced him to the idea of nonviolence. From the first sentence to the last, you get to know Joe, the titular protagonist who was troubled but was ever the supportive critic, constantly pushing Will to truly evaluate his motives within the movement.

The murder of a friend, Jonathan Daniels, provided the moment of clarity for Rev. Campbell. He had spent his adult life in a state of self-assured sophistication, but now realized that in seeking racial justice, he had been overlooking the true nature of the tragedy, that poor whites—the murderers of activists like Daniels—were part of the tragedy, too.

Forty Acres and a Goat is a companion memoir that develops on the lessons from Brother to a Dragonfly and extends them in time as he returned to a rural home, this time to a farm outside of Nashville, Tennessee. We meet Jackson, the goat and gatekeeper to the draft-dodgers and other non-conformists who visited or found refuge in the Campbells’ company.

We also meet his black friend T. J. Eaves, a relationship that spans the book and is framed by the fracturing of the movement itself, as the calls for Black Power collided with the commitment to nonviolent inter-racialism. Rev. Campbell never gave up on the project of the Beloved Community, even fashioning his own version in microcosm of what his friends called the Church of the Forty Acres and a Goat on his farm.

One can read these books for their value as eyewitness accounts into this era, but they should also be read because Rev. Campbell is a great writer and an incredible storyteller. He is hilarious, as in the time he and his classmates have to submit fecal samples as part of a New Deal program to eradicate hookworms, or the time he stepped to a lectern for his opening speech during a televised debate over the death penalty, and simply asserted, “I just think it’s tacky,” and then sat down.

Ultimately, the books offer appropriate reflections on this day of Pentecost, when all tongues and races were together at the Christian church’s inception.

Carter Dalton Lyon is the author of Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign and chairs the history department at St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee.

Tag: Authors Review Books (Page 1 of 2)

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William Boyle’s ‘Gravesend’ dazzles with depth of characters

Two of Will Campbell’s memoirs create balm for healing, love

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