Snowden Wright is the author of the new novel The Queen City Detective Agency. His other books include American Pop. He lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.
Q: What inspired you to write The Queen City Detective Agency, and how did you create your character Clementine Baldwin?
A: The plot of Queen City began with a true story. Back in the ‘80s, my father, the district attorney, was prosecuting a case in which a woman hired a Dixie Mafia hit man to kill her husband for the insurance money, as one does.
The conduit for the hit, Peanut Griffin, broke out of the county jail, at which point he recalled that the jail was located on the roof of the county courthouse.
While stranded on the roof, with nowhere to run, Peanut yelled to the crowd gathered in the street that he was going to kill my father, my pregnant mother, and me. I was 2 years old at the time.
The police didn’t take those death threats lightly. They pulled up at my family’s house, startling my mother, who had not heard about the jailbreak. “Don’t worry, ma’am,” the police told her. “A verbal threat has been made on your life, but the individual is still at the jail.”
“What do you mean, ‘at’ the jail?” my mom said. “Should he be ‘in’ it?!”
In my fictional version of that case, the mother of Peanut’s novelistic analog hires the Queen City Detective Agency to find out what really happened to her son. The proprietor of said detective agency is a young Black woman and former cop named Clementine Baldwin.
My editor and I, during the lead-up to the book’s launch, brainstormed a number of taglines, many of which involved Clem. “It takes a new kind of detective to bring down the Old South.” “This Southern Sherlock doesn’t take any sh-t.”
My favorite involved the milieu of Mississippi in the 1980s, with all its racism, classism, and sexism, and how a hard-bitten, hard-living detective the likes of Clementine Baldwin would deal with it: “The land of Faulkner is about to get faulked up!”
Q: The novel is set in Meridian, Mississippi—how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: “The setting is a character!” you often hear, and though I understand the meaning behind the cliché—that an author has used techniques of characterization to make their setting feel dynamic and alive—I’m a bit old-fashioned. Why can’t settings be settings and characters characters?
Nonetheless, setting should always have character, those distinguishing attributes that make a place memorable and, more importantly, specific.
Queen City is set in my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, the state’s erstwhile “Queen City” and, in the 1980s, essentially the Wild West. Meridian sat at the center of a crime network between Birmingham, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Biloxi.
My hometown, like the South at large, was not and is not perfect. This book can at times be hard on it. But I consider thoughtful, well-intentioned criticism a form of respect.
If a book critic called me a genius who has never written an imperfect sentence, I’d be flattered, of course, but I wouldn’t be able to take those claims seriously because the critic didn’t take me seriously as a writer. Hagiography can be a kind of disrespect.
I hope I wasn’t too, too hard on Meridian. Sometimes I think this novel’s attitude toward my hometown is the literary equivalent of a nookie. I’ve got Meridian in a headlock and am raking my knuckles against its scalp. You rascal, you. Shape up.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: My father recently told me a story about how, not long ago, he was called in by the FBI to discuss a case he’d investigated when he was the DA. They were reopening the case and wanted his input. In a boardroom, after answering questions from two federal agents, one younger and one older, my father asked why the case was being reopened.
“Sir,” the younger agent said, “that information is classified, and you are not privy to it,” to which the older agent responded, “Son, this man has been privy to more classified information than your momma was to the contents of your diaper!”
In many ways, I’ve been researching this novel my entire life, because for my entire life, I’ve heard stories like that.
Did I learn anything that surprised me? Yes, particularly with regard to the craft of writing. I learned to value narrative. I learned the importance of story. Plot may be a word with four letters, but it’s not a four-letter word. Nobody’s favorite part of Anna Karenina is the stuff on farming reform.
Q: The writer Ace Atkins said of the book, “The book is chock full of more crazies than Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. But its hero, PI Clem Baldwin, proves to be a perfect guide into the cloistered and complicated world of 1980s Meridian, Mississippi.” What do you think of that description?
A: What do I think? Nothing! That description turns my mind into a great, big void of thought filled only with gratitude. I’m so grateful to the exceptionally talented Ace Atkins for all his kind and generous support.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on another Clem Baldwin who-done-did-it. In the Queen City sequel, tentatively titled The Hurricane Party, Clem is on the Florida Panhandle, sometimes called the “Redneck Riviera,” working a case. She’s recruited by the FBI to infiltrate a gang of ecoterrorists they believe have kidnapped a senator’s daughter.
The book jumps ahead a few years, which allows me to explore the ‘90s and reference pop-culture touchstones I was raised on: Terminator 2, Full House, R.E.M., MC Hammer, and, most influential on this book, Point Break.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m also writing a historical novel. Although True Delta is a work of fiction, it concerns a real group of people from American history: the roughly 10,000 Southerners who, after the Civil War, immigrated to Brazil.
The novel centers on the town of New Vicksburg and the lives of its many residents, all of whom are grappling with their “exile” from America and the repercussions, figurative and literal, of having been on the wrong side of history.
In addition to cheap farmland, tax breaks, and subsidized travel—the Brazilian government’s incentives to entice Southerners to expatriate—the “Confederados” of New Vicksburg are granted another benefit, one that will prove to be a curse. I recently returned from a two-month research trip to Brazil, and I’m incredibly excited about the potential for True Delta.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment