Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.

It’d stormed the night before over much of the southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, loved alone in rural Mississippi in his parents’ house, which was now his house, though he couldn’t bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying the mail and paying the bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tacks, eating his McDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as the day bled out of the trees across the field and night settled in, each different, each the same. (pg. 1)

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by  Edgar Winning author Tom Franklin, is set in rural Mississippi and the title refers to a song children in the south were taught to remember how to spell “Mississippi”.  The novel has two protagonists: white Larry Ott, a broken down owner of a gas station/car repair with no customers; and black Silas Jones, former high school baseball star, recently returned to the area, town constable. These two individuals were briefly and secretly, friends in a south that did not allow such relationships between people of different races. Franklin alternates between these two narrators giving us events, both past and present, from their different points of views. Sometimes this technique can produce a disjointed experience for the reader, but in this case, the author maintains tight control and the excellent writing and plot carries the reader through the different perspectives. I was drawn into the mystery, the secrets from the past, and the slow uncovering of the truth. There are also two missing girls – one in the present and one in the past – and the possible connections between these two cases is the central component of the mystery. However, Franklin doesn’t make things easy for the reader as he carefully doles out revelations and answers.

Franklin is all helped along by his vivid descriptions of landscape, atmosphere, and action – words like, “…more clouds shouldering over the far trees and rain on the air.” (pg. 2) Or “Cane Creek was more like a slough, he thought. It hardly moved at all, its blackberry water stirred only by the wakes of the frogs, or bubbles from the bottom…” (p. 10). The south’s prejudices are not only a thing of the past – although tempered by time, they are still present in subtle ways:

Silas just beat the lunch rush and got a corner booth. He put his hat off to the side and waited, gazing out the window at the high crumbling courthouse across the street, its arched windows and columns, at the white lawyers in suits walking down one side of the long concrete steps and the families of the black folks they would convict or acquit walking down the other (pg. 139).

While Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter has a compelling mystery, it is about more than a search for the truth – it is about the holes people have, holes created by the deprivations of youth – from parents who don’t understand, to homelessness, to struggling to fit into a hierarchy fraught with racial and class pitfalls. The author talks about how inured you can get to this reality; so much so it becomes hard to see any other way of being:

The First Century Church…asked its members to fast for three-day periods at certain times of the year. Larry never accompanied his mother to the fabricated metal building they used…but hungry for God, he would abstain from food when she did. He found the first skipped meals the hardest, the hunger a hollow ache. The longer he went without eating, though, the second day, the third; the pain would subside from an ache to the memory of an ache and finally the memory of a memory. Until you ate you didn’t know how hungry you were, how empty you‘d become. (p. 182)

There are other complexities in this mystery such as the road people choose to take. Everyone has roads they have not taken in their life, decisions and choices that led down a different path. What would have happened if you had not turned your back, if you had stepped up, if you left instead of staying, if you stayed instead of leaving? Both Silas and Larry have made these choices – they each have traveled a certain road and now, in looking back over the past, perhaps a different choice would have led to a better outcome. However, rather than being a melancholy examination of life’s mistakes, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a hopeful picture of life continuing. All of this isn’t easy to accomplish but somehow Franklin makes it look effortless.

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