Paddock’s Picks: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock
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Pick up a book titled “Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter” and you know immediately that it must be a book about Mississippi. How else would any of us have learned to spell that state to the south of us without that little jingle?

Tom Franklin, who hails from Alabama, but teaches at Ole Miss in Oxford, has got the language of both white folks and black down as well as any author I’ve read, including Larry Brown, another Southern writer who passed away several years ago.

It takes a keen ear and a clever pen to capture the melody and subtle little nuances of old and young, black and white characters with a true Mississippi accent. Franklin exhibits perfection in his novel with his terrific characters, plot, story development, and descriptions of rural, small town Mississippi and its inhabitants.

The novel opens with Larry Ott stepping out on the front porch of his rambling country home in rural Mississippi. The author’s description of the muddy driveway, the bobwire fence, the sodden grass, the goldenrod and thistle, and the honeysuckle is so sweet you can smell it on the page. An early September storm has just moved through, causing his mother’s wind chimes to get tangled in her Boston ferns hung from the eaves of the porch. Larry untangles the ferns because he’s a good son.

Larry’s tyrant of a father, a middle-class mechanic, is dead, and his mother is in a nursing home. Larry runs his father’s old garage, which rarely does any business because the town of only 500 people is dying. Larry is also known as “Scary Larry” because some folks think he killed a girl back when they were in high school. Larry is a weird guy with no friends, but he visits his mama when she has her good days and looks after her chickens that have names like Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosalynn Carter and Ladybird Johnson.

When Larry was a boy, he played with Silas Jones, the son of a poor black single mom who lived in a shack on Ott property. Larry shared his Stephen King books with Silas, and they played baseball together. They also were sweet on a country girl named Cindy, whose step-father beat her and her mother regularly. Their friendship had to be kept secret because that’s the way it was in Mississippi in the 1970‘s.

Silas excelled in athletics, particularly baseball, and went off  to Ole Miss on a scholarship. He was also known as “38” the number he wore on his baseball uniform. Even though he was black, he was treated as a hero because of his athletic prowess, and Larry was left to plead innocent to the disappearance of the girl named Cindy, who was last seen with Larry.

The novel begins with Larry as a man nearing 40. Nothing much has changed for him since he was in high school. He drives his father’s old truck, tends to the bills at the house and the shop, watches a little television, and goes to sleep with a book.

Silas has returned home to be a constable. He drives a beat-up jeep and has fallen for a cute little ambulance driver who thinks he’s pretty cute, too. Only a little younger than Larry, Silas wants to forget he ever knew Larry.

When a wealthy lumberman’s daughter disappears, the town folks once again think “Scary Larry” is somehow connected. At the same time, a black drug dealer is found dead, and the town folks think Larry might somehow be related to that killing as well.

Silas has never believed that Larry was capable of anything wrong, and when he investigates another shooting, this time one of Larry in his own kitchen, Silas is determined to find out answers to questions that have plagued him all his life.

Just what is the real connection between Silas and Larry, and why was his mother so dead-set against Silas’s friendship with Larry?

The novel is not told in chronological order, but back and forth from youth to manhood in the main characters’ lives. Tom Franklin does it so effortlessly that the reader is never lost, but is always eager to see what happens next.

This book is a mystery/novel. Tom Franklin says it’s the most autobiographical book he’s written. (He has three others that were so violent I couldn’t get past the blood.) Most of the men in his family are mechanics, and he acknowledges the help he received in writing this book from his father and uncle. In fact, he says he spent his childhood in their garage, listening to their stories and handing them wrenches.

•••

Good at working with his hands and following in his father’s footsteps led Mike Buehrer to the profession of airplane mechanic. He began his career in 1977 and has been with Arkansas Best Corp. since 1990.

His dad was an airplane mechanic for Frontier Airlines, and that position is what brought the family to Fort Smith.

Mike credits his love of reading to the time of his youth when the family didn’t own a television for almost three years. They spent a lot of time reading books and magazines, and passing them between each other. “National Geographic” and “Field and Stream” are two of the magazines Mike most remembers reading and enjoying.

Even though Mike can now watch all the television he wants, he still enjoys the habit of  reading instilled in him as a young boy. Mike is reading “Charlie Wilson’s War” by George Crile.