MysteryPeople Pick of the Month: ‘Crimes in Southern Indiana’

MysteryPeople Pick for August:

Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories
by Frank Bill

Frank Bill has been building quite a buzz around him. His rough and tumble stories have been published in some of the best online crime zines like Beat To A Pulp and Crime Factory and he has been praised by the likes of Christa Faust and Scott Phillips. A fresh voice in the rural noir movement, he has been drawing comparisons to Daniel Woodrell and Dan Ray Pollack. Crimes In Southern Indiana proves it’s not just hype.

This collection of stories, many of which are linked, occur in a world that is very real, with heightened instances for hard boiled pleasure. It’s where the South and Midwest meet. There may not be a criminal code, but there is still one of kin and honor. Factories and family farms are an endangered species. Poverty has a firm grasp and meth has become the heartland’s crack cocaine. The main difference in this drug culture is that it has a long history of being gun culture, as well. The people know how to shoot and they don’t wait around to do it.

While the region brings richness to the stories, it is Frank Bill’s craftsmanship that carries them. In “Coon Hunter’s Noir”, our hero tracks down his stolen hound, finding more treachery, betrayal, and violence than any Maltese falcon could bring. Another tale where a a boy meets his once (and possibly still) abusive grandfather builds slowburn suspense with the possibility of grace. Bill never shies away from the pulp aspects of his writing. He delivers some truly visceral gun battles and his humor can be dark as coal. No matter how over the top the story is, though, he grounds them in the wet, dark earth with believable, fully developed characters who have been living on the edge for some time. Circumstances have now just pushed them over it. A lesser author may have kept his distance from these people, making them caricatures. Frank Bill is up close and personal.

There’s a direct line from this collection to the early Continental Op stories by Dashille Hammett with their blunt delivery that gives voice to and for the people he is writing about. They have that hard lyriscm that can be found in the songs of Steve Earle or Merle Haggard. Crimes In Southern Indiana is a prose album of chilling bluegrass songs, the kind that Robert Earl Keen once described as “Not where only are the people murdered, they’re dismembered.”

~Scott Montgomery, MysteryPeople Crime Fiction Coordinator