Tom Franklin - Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter von Tom Franklin. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial.

Class and social status

The South maintained an almost feudal social system far into the modern era, with powerful, dynastic landowners who ran their vast estates like medieval aristocratic properties, complete with successive generations of servants and, for a long period, slave labour. In Crooked Letter , the clearest example of class and social tensions is combined with racial issues in the idea of “white trash”, specifically Wallace Stringfellow and the Walker family. These are white people who are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, poor, uneducated, unskilled, unemployed, and often associated with drug addiction, alcoholism and domestic abuse. We can see in the character of Wallace how a lifetime of being treated like dirt can make you believe it at some point (“I ain’t worth a shit”, 283.10), but the combination of this sense of worthlessness with Wallace’s emotional and psychological problems makes him a dangerous character. Cindy Walker on the other hand has also been subject to contempt and abuse throughout her young life, but she wants to escape and find a better life.

Religion

Religion in the Deep South has an interesting and diverse history. There is a long tradition of Protestantism, but the predominant denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention. There are also many Methodists.

Religion plays a minor role in Crooked Letter.Larry is a believer, and Wallace’s first memories of Larry are of him in a church. Larry and his mother feel a genuine hunger for religion and must search for congregations which will accept them after Larry becomes the main suspect in the disappearance of Cindy Walker. They are Baptists.

SUMMARY

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was Franklin’s third novel, and is his most successful and famous work.

Poachers

His first published work, this collection of short stories won a major prize in the field of crime fiction (the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Short Story).

Hell at the Breech and Smonk

His first two novels are historical novels, both examples of regional fiction, as they are set in Alabama. Hell at the Breech [1], his debut, was based on actual historical events. Smonk is a wildly over-the-top novel about a brutal rapist and his path of destruction, intended in part as a reaction against or parody of the excessively masculine Southern fiction of established writers like Cormac McCarthy (famous for novels like Blood Meridian – published 1985).

Smonk

has recently been translated into German for the first time and has been receiving a lot of attention for its grotesque, energetic humour and brutality[2].

The Tilted World

Co-written with his wife, this is another historical, regional novel, set in Mississippi in 1927.

SUMMARY

Tom Franklin is widely considered to be a regional, and specifically Southern writer. All of his published work has been set in Mississippi or Alabama, and the region and his experiences there have shaped his work as a writer.

“To write a story, you have to get the details right. You have to convince a reader you know what you’re talking about.”[3]

(Tom Franklin)

Franklin’s personal background in the region and his familiarity with the life, landscape, history, people and feel of the South means that there are traces of his life and experience in his work. This is also true of Crooked Letter : for example, like Larry, he grew up with a father who ran a car repair workshop in a tiny rural community.

He mentions in interviews how much autobiographical detail has slipped into Crooked Letter : “the character of Silas "32" Jones is very loosely based on the sole police officer of the hamlet of Dickinson, Alabama, where I grew up”[4] and “I used a lot of autobiographical stuff for Larry, the mechanic”[5]. These autobiographical detailsinclude Larry’s reading habits – when asked in an interview who his favourite writers were and are, Franklin says, “I loved Stephen King and Edgar Rice Burroughs as a kid”[6].

His roots in the Southhave shaped him as a writer:

“So, yes, the souths made me the writer I am. It taught me to listen to the cadences and rhythms of speech, and to notice the landscape. It also has this defeated feel, a lingering of old sin, that makes it sweet in a rotting kind of way. Much of it is poor, much is rural, and thats an interesting combination, a deep well for stories.”[7]

In the same interview, Franklin talks briefly about the origins of the novel: “Id been wanting to write about a small town police officer, and Id long had the image of a loner mechanic in my mind. When I put the two together, the story began to form.”

This comment reinforces the impression many readers of Crooked Letter have that this is primarily a character-driven novel, and, despite the plot, only secondarily a crime thriller.

SUMMARY

Two young boys, Larry and Silas, become friends in rural Mississippi in the late 1970s. A girl, Cindy Walker, disappears, feared dead, and suspicion falls on Larry.

Twenty-five years later, Larry is an outcast in the area, and Silas is now a police officer, investigating the disappearance of a local girl, Tina Rutherford. Larry is again a suspect, even after he is found shot and badly wounded in his own home. Silas investigates the crime and is forced to re-examine his own history. After Silas has confessed about the events of 1982, he and Larry can begin to mend their friendship.

What follows in this section is a brief chapter-by-chapter summary of the novel. Some of the chapters are based entirely or largely in the past, as the novel covers two different periods (1979–1982 and two weeks in 2007), and these flashbacks are indicated in the summaries.

one

The novel starts with Larry Ott, a 41-year old man who lives alone in his parents’ house. He wakes up and goes about his morning routine, looking after his chickens, and heads off to work in his father’s car repair workshop, Ottomotive. On the way he gets a call from his mother, who is in a nursing home, saying that she would like to see him. He heads back home. When he walks into his house he is ambushed by an intruder wearing an old zombie mask which Larry has had since he was a boy. The intruder shoots him and then watches him bleeding out on the kitchen floor.

two

Police Constable Silas “32” Jones is patrolling when he sees an unusually large number of buzzards – carrion eater birds – hovering over an area of woodland. He investigates, hoping/fearing that he will find the corpse of a missing girl, Tina Rutherford. Instead he finds the body of Morton ”M&M” Morrisette in a swamp. M&M was a local marijuana dealer with whom Silas had played baseball and been good friends in high school.

Local detective and investigator Roy French arrives, followed by other officials, including Silas’ girlfriend Angie, an EMT (emergency medical technician).

Later, back in the office he shares with Miss Voncille, the city clerk, Silas is visited by French, who says that he had visited Larry Ott regarding the missing Rutherford girl. Silas follows up on a report that a rattlesnake has been found in someones mailbox. The mailbox belongs to a woman named Irina who shares a house with two other divorcees in a run-down area populated by poor whites.