Published in Hardback by William Morrow,
1 October
2013.
ISBN: 978-0062069184
I found this book slow
to get into, but once I was in, was completely drawn into the story. In
1927, after months of non-stop rain, the Mississippi River
is about ready to burst its banks and break through the huge levees which keep
it under some kind of control. The setting is superbly realized, and the
characters are marvellously well-drawn, so much so that I was there with them
the whole time, hunched under that rain, trudging through that mud, stirring
the corn-mash in that illicit still. I really hated to let them go at the
end of the book.
Dixie Clay, we learn early on, is a gifted boot-legger,
producing a brand of moonshine called Black Lightning which, in those years of
Prohibition, was in huge demand everywhere. Her husband Jesse is a
complete waste of space, and she has recently lost her young child. So
when another baby is more or less thrust into her arms, she grabs it with no
questions asked. The donor is called Ingersoll, a blues-playing guitarist
and revenue officer who found the baby next to his dead parents. He and
his partner, Ham, a huge red-headed mutton-chopped former soldier, are detailed
off by Herbert Hoover to seek and find any and all of the stills they can find,
and travelling as engineers to conceal their true identities, 'mysterious,
ruthless, unbribable.'
The rains fall. The river rises. Even the pages
of the book seemed damp after a while, so much water was there in the story.
People are evacuated, before the levee bursts, which it does, thanks to
saboteurs detonating a huge amount of explosives.
This is a gripping story about one of the worst (and yet
little remembered) natural disasters the US has ever known, particularly
apposite after Katrina. It is beautifully written (one of the co-authors
is a poet and it shows). Very highly recommended.
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Reviewer: Susan Moody
Tom Franklin was
born in the hamlet of Dickinson,
Alabama. He grew up a non-hunter
in a hunting household, preferring writing, drawing, and reading. The first
member of his family to finish college. He went to the University of South Alabama,
but got such bad grades that his father told me he wasn't going to pay anymore.
From there, he got jobs in a warehouse, at a plant that made sandblasting grit,
and finally with an engineering firm, which sent him to a chemical plant where
he spent years cleaning up hazardous waste. All through these jobs, he took
classes at the University
of South Alabama, paying
his own tuition, and finally discovering creative writing classes. In his late
twenties, he finished his BA and later his MA, in a hospital in Mobile, also tutoring in
the university's writing lab. From there, he got a job teaching at Selma University,
an historical all-black Baptist college. He’d published a few short stories and
won third prize in the Playboy College Fiction Contest (around 1991), and so
decided to pursue writing as a career. He applied to several MFA programs and
wound up, fortunately, at the University
of Arkansas, where he met
his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly. At the end of that four-year-long program, he
sold his first book,
Poachers, and
the idea for
Hell at the Breech, to
William Morrow. He was later offered the John and Renee Grisham Chair in
Creative Writing in Oxford,
Mississippi. The family love Oxford and hope never to
leave.
Beth Ann Fennelly
was born on May 21, 1971, in New Jersey but
grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois. She obtained her B.A. magna
cum laude in 1993 from the University of Notre Dame. After graduation, Fennelly
taught English in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border. When
she returned to the States, she earned the M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Arkansas. She then received the
1999 Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin.
She was also the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She became
an Assistant Professor of English and taught poetry at Knox
College in Galesburg, Illinois.
Her chapbook
A Different Kind of Hunger, published by the
Texas Review Press, won the 1997 Texas Review Breakthrough Award.
Her poems have been anthologized in
Poets of the New Century, The
Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Best American Poetry 1996, and
The
Pushcart Prize 2001 and others. Fennelly's book of poems,
Open
House, has won numerous awards, including the 2001 Kenyon
Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book. Her next book,
Tender
Hooks, was published in 2004 by W. W. Norton & Company. Her husband
is Tom Franklin, also a fiction writer, and together they have a daughter
Claire. Currently, Beth Ann Fennelly resides in
Oxford,
Mississippi, where she is Assistant
Professor of English at the University
of Mississippi
Susan Moody was born in Oxford is the principal
nom de plume of
Susan
Elizabeth Donaldson, née Horwood, a British novelist best known for her
suspense novels. She is a former Chairman of the Crime Writer's Association,
served as World President of the International Association of Crime Writers,
and was elected to the prestigious Detection Club. Susan Moody has given
numerous courses on writing crime fiction and continues to teach creative
writing in England, France, Australia,
the USA and Denmark.
In addition to her many stand alone books,
Susan has written two series, on featuring PI
Penny
Wanawake (seven books) and a series of six books featuring bridge player Cassie
Swan.
Elizabeth Flynn is
a Londoner of Anglo-Irish parentage. An ex-actress she currently works in a
hospital. However she has always written and has a particular interest in crime
fiction. For several years she has also been a keen tennis fan and is very
happy that her first novel is a murder mystery set in the tennis world.
