A Killing at Cotton Hill by Terry Shames

A Killing at Cotton Hill by Terry Shames

Very proud of my Aunt Terry for publishing her first novel! As diligent readers of this blog know, my Aunt had a tremendous influence on my taste in fiction, supplying me with age-inappropriate novels at an early age, and rewarding me with loads of books most birthdays and Christmases. So it was with great pleasure that I finally got to enjoy something she wrote.

Writing a review of a work created by someone you love is always difficult. Honest feedback? Saccharine praise? Seems like there’s no good way to win. So let’s play this one straight but sunny:

Samuel Craddock used to be the chief of police in a fictional town based loosely on Brenham, Texas. Now he’s a good natured widower who collects regionally inappropriate artwork, raises cows, and flirts aimlessly with the old biddies in his community. When a good friend is found murdered, Craddock gets involved, helping out her grandson and, ultimately, sleuthing out the guilty.

Terry’s novel is a fast read in a genre style known as the “cozy.” This is a mystery characterized by a plucky, relatable protagonist, relatively bloodless murders, and a focus on hobbyist details of some largely unrelated past-time. (Think “Murder, She Wrote.”) In this case, the hobby is art collection, which frequently ends up feeling like the real focus of the novel, with the poor old murdered lady regularly taking a backseat to discussion of various modernist painters and the talents of the improbable grandson of the victim, himself a young artistic phenom.

The writing is light, with dialog that generally rings true, sentences which don’t try too hard, and excellent pacing that keeps the action propelled forward. At first the tense struck me as slightly odd… first person present tense isn’t something I think of as very common. (“I set my bag down inside the kitchen and stand looking around.”) Perhaps this is a standard in cozies? Terry has a good ear for the language of rural Texas, and (mostly) avoids the tendency to have her characters speak in corn-pone regionalisms.

The mystery itself is (oddly) reminiscent of some of Travis McGee’s adventures, with seedy land speculators, fallen women, and incompetent local law enforcement all constantly crowding around the protagonist. Unlike McGee though, Craddock is a gentleman, and he avoids any sexcapades or bad language. This keeps the novel firmly in PG territory, bloodless and sweet, as opposed to sanguine and salty. Again, I suspect this is true to the cozy form.

As a debut novel, and one that I understand to already have a sequel in the works, A Killing At Cotton Hill is a fun introduction to a kindly old detective, in the least trashy small town in fictional Texas. I look forward to more of Samuel Craddock’s adventures.

Big applause to my awesome Aunt for her first novel!

Roads by Larry McMurtry

Roads is a book that I will buy another copy of. While the first one will go onto my shelf, alongside all of McMurtry's other works, this second copy has a different fate in store. Roads is a book that I want to keep in my car. I want to paste a US roadmap to outside (like book covers in school) and annotate each highway and interstate segment with the page number on which he offers commentary on that artery. It would be great to always have this book with you while you were on a roadtrip.

Roads contains a dozen essays, each one of which is just a chronological ramble on LMM's drives from one place to another. His usual sardonic wit and attention to social structure and mannerisms is present on every page. He is rarely positive about any place he drives through. In addition, his fearsome arsenal of literary memories is brought to bear every few pages as he quotes, quips, and quibbles with and about the various author's whose hometowns he visits. He indicts Hemmingway's third wife for her tacky taste in furniture, praises Willa Cather's Arizona & Nebraska. In almost every county he explores, LMM is able to talk fluently about the works of those author's whose writings mention a particular landmark. I'd love to hear a conversation between he and Mrs. Anne Fadiman.

This book is also likely to be of interest to any other McMurtry scholars out there because of it's deep biographical component. He doesn't hesitate to remnisce (seldom elegaic, usually half-way bitterly) about those places which have touched his life when he passes through them. As a companion piece to In A Narrow Grave, this book serves to, in a sense, chronicle the last 20 years of LMM's mental progress (why do I want to use the word decay there?), literary adventures, and geographical wandering. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Travels with Charley by my beloved Steinbeck, and Lars Somebody's Travels with Lizbeth, written much later. Like those, this book is a travelogue, describing one man's undirected journeys across America; both the geographical patchwork of highways, roads, and interstates, and the far more interesting network of books, loves, and memories.

-tf

I just finished In A Narrow Grave. Review.


In A Narrow Grave by Larry McMurtry

Written in 1968 and now out of print, I was surpised to even hear of McMurtry's fourth book, titled 'In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas'. I thought that I'd read almost all of LMM's novels, and was going through a recent collection of Essays he wrote entitled 'Roads' in which we mentions that anyone who wants to know his opinion on Austin should read In A Narrow Grave. Luckily, my kind mother found the book for me in some used bookstore (of which LMM himself is said to own the largest in the state, somewhere up near Archer City) and gave it to me for Christmas.

In A Narrow Grave is a collection of 10 essays written in an elegaic tone. They deal with the character of several Texas cities, a farewell to the departed cowboy god of Texas, embodied (to LMM) by Frank Dobie's portrait of rancher Charles Goodnight and characters like Woodrow Call from Lonesome Dove, or the grandfather from Horseman Pass By. Indeed, LMM is clearly obsessed by the dissapearing myth of the cowboy. His entire tone is one of a wistful lament. Texas is a vast, empty space for LMM, now dead without his mythical heroes and indians. Reading In A Narrow Grave is like looking at a template for every LMM novel to date. His use of language is precise, folksy and possessed of a sort of tounge-in-cheek colloquial character. McMurtry repeats himself regularly, like the characters he describes, his thoughts keep coming back to the relationship between West Texas men and women, the status-obsessed provincialism of his hometown of Archer County (where he claims bestiality was rampant). It is his (and the earlier McMurtrys') love / hate relationship with his home soil to which he returns most frequently in this collection. While the focus is ostensibly on Texas as a whole, McMurtry seems to never be able to tear his gaze far from Archer County and his mythical town of Thalia. Like an old cowboy endlessly repeating himself around the campfire to any new bucks who will stop and listen, McMurtry seems stuck. In his essays he cannot leave Archer City behind, and as a man he can't seem to escape either. He is trapped by his books and his native land; stuck watching the plains suburbanize, selling used novels in a drafty warehouse, and hoping to catch a last glimpse of his cowboy god; a god who has already passed forever beyond his reach.