First in the ‘Highway 59’ series of crime procedurals set in East Texas near the border of Louisiana, this volume also moves the genre into African American rural life, a niche I’m not aware of being plumbed before. And plumbed is appropriate, as Locke’s goal is clearly to illuminate the hidden depths and conduits of life at the very edge of subsistence. Geneva Sweet’s one-room restaurant/barber shop is hand built and about as ramshackle as it gets, yet it is the only economic support of several lives, and the only social connector for black folks in the small community of Lark, Texas, just as the roadhouse bar down the road is the only one for whites. (Note that church is barely present in this tale, contrary to the image so often projected, of church going and church connections being the glue that holds rural life together. Appears to be an intentional choice by the author, not an oversight – these people are driven far more by family and race than any other gospels, far more by appetites and expedience than any high-flown morals or principals, which seem to reside only within the conflicted minds of well-off outsiders.)  

 Insiders and outsiders is also a strong theme here, in particular, the ways in which those who were born and raised in a place quickly become outsiders once they leave, yet retain the place and connection in ways that surface forcefully under duress. Both Darren Mathews, the Texas Ranger protagonist, and Michael Wright, one of two murder victims, and even Joe Sweet, whose history predates the action, have struggled with that, and eventually paid great prices for the disconnect. The degree to which those who have never left can become stunted by their limited exposure and consumption is equally well-expressed, particularly in a passage regarding murderer Keith Dale who “had never been north of Oklahoma, thought the world outside Texas was a cesspool of race mixing and confusion about who built this country, spics and nigs with their hands out begging for this that and the other, never doing a decent day’s work in their lives, but even still they were coming for our jobs, coming for our wives and daughters…”

I’m not rushing out to try a ‘fried pie’ just now, and still amazed that a dinner party for nine people justifies picking up ‘seven pounds of brisket’ and ‘a couple of chickens’, but that just shows how far my background is from this setting. The references to Texas blues and the musician’s lifestyle, on the other hand, were effective means to connect with what is certainly new ground for plenty of other readers as well.  (Any novel which features 1955 Les Paul as its Rosebud has got my instant attention….). 

A captivating read and clearly intended to establish a character and setting for a series (after this 2018 release, a second installment titled Heaven My Home came out in 2019.). Whether or not I’ll follow that up is still in doubt, but I can well imagine there’s an audience for it. Whether that audience is primarily African American, or not will be worth noting.

P. S.:  To read Blue bird, Bluebird right after Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective is to be impressed with the many ways in which contemporary novelists are broadening the settings, preoccupations and appeal of the crime genre, while clearly working off its traditions of darkness, corruption, the reticence of hard men and the redemptive power of drink, memory and an attractive woman. Plu ca change…