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• In what is essentially a Southern crime novel Tom Franklin writes about the South, and its people, with heart and truth. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a nuanced story of how two crimes – the disappearances of two young women in Chabot, Mississippi a quarter of a century apart - affect the entire town. Larry Ott, the boy, and now man, accused in both instances, is ostracized for most of his life as a result. Silas Jones – now the town constable – was Larry’s secret boyhood friend but now avoids him, as does most of the town, except for a misfit called Wallace Stringfellow. Larry is white, Silas black. Race is relevant throughout the story. In Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, humanity grows from the depths of inhumanity. How Larry and Silas react to the circumstances that surround them is the story.

  5.00 out of 5

  Hagelstein

• Tom Franklin begins the mystery in his novel with the title, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. It comes from the way children are taught to spell the state’s name. He doesn’t stop there though. From the first page his protagonist, Larry Ott, grabs the reader’s attention. Why is this forty-one year old auto mechanic shunned by the residents of Oxford, Mississippi? Twenty years ago, Larry Ott took a girl to a drive-in movie and she disappeared. The police harass Larry and everyone knows that he killed her, but without hard evidence, they can’t make a murder charge stick. Franklin’s novel opens with the sentence: “The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house.” A girl is missing again and someone thinks Larry Ott had something to do with it.Revelations emerge from the police investigations, his former best friend, Silas, and the inexhaustible memories of the town’s people. Tom Franklin has created unforgettable characters in Larry and Silas. He compels us to keep reading not only to find out what happens next, but also to learn more about Larry. But, there’s more. The dialogue snaps, crackles and pops. The plot has more twists and curves than a bowl of al dente spaghetti. And the pages keep turning. It’s not surprising that this book has won Tom Franklin an Edgar nomination. His collection of short stories, Poachers, has already claimed an Edgar. Franklin surges beyond the page-turner rank. Franklin will mesmerize you and the events that take place in this small southern town will haunt you long after last week’s best seller has slipped from your mind.

  5.00 out of 5

  cvjacobs

• I’m always a bit hesitant when books are compared to some classics that just.. are incomparable – but in the case of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, I can see why the classic Harper Lee story is brought to mind. What Tom Franklin has done with the story of Larry and Silas “32″ is nothing short of horrifying and heart-aching.From the first few sentences I was immediately hooked by Larry – by his character, by sorrow for him even though I wasn’t aware of what exactly he had done, or not done, and I was struck by how unfairly life had been treating him. With chickens, a tractor, a sick mother and a few other tools Tom Franklin manages to infuse into Larry the type of character of a man who has been beaten down by life and the people around him – all through no fault of his own. Think being naive is harmless? Not for Larry Ott.Then Silas “32″ Jones comes on the scene. This is, again, one of those stories where the “twist” isn’t the main point of the story – it’s very easy to spot from afar, but it doesn’t matter, because there is more meat to the story then the twist.This is a fascinating story about what happens if the tables were turned, how the South treats one man over the other, had he been in the same position, how the power rests in the hands of the most unlikely person and how restitution can begin to be made.

  5.00 out of 5

  TheLostEntwife

• I loved this book. The structure is perfect, the characters compassionately and truly portrayed, the suspense tight, the language never running away with itself and at times so lovely I had to re-read it.This is a novel about a quiet hero who is misunderstood by his family and shunned by his community, though he has never hurt a soul, a man who is kind to chickens. It is a novel about another man who is haunted by a choice he made when young, understandable at the time, but which blighted the life of another. And at the end, I cried because the ending was perfect.My older daughter came to read over my shoulder, wanting to find out what all the fuss was about. “You’d have to read the book,” I said, “otherwise it won’t make sense that I’m crying.” Then she mocked me with an imitation of my boo-ing and hoo-ing, and I can’t get mad over that. I know I am not a pretty sight when I weep over a book.I was curious to read this novel right after American Rust because they have elements in common. Both revolve around a murder and the unlikely friendship between two boys, one a reader, the other an athlete in an economically faltering, single industry area. The setting is different, the rust belt vs the American south, and the literary approach is very different.No stream of consciousness for Tom Franklin. (Before I go on, I have to tell you that a part of me just wants to jump up and down and say, oh it’s so good! Read it!) He superbly uses third person narrative to shift between the perspectives of Larry Ott and his one-time friend, Silas Jones, currently a police officer in Mississippi. That Larry is white and Silas black complicated their friendship in the 1970′s, and that complication had long-term and painful consequences. Franklin also shifts in time between the present and the past, gradually and tantalizingly unraveling two related mysteries, a girl gone missing in 1982 and another in the present day.I read it breathlessly, unable to put it down. Though I guessed at some of the revelations before they came, that didn’t matter because what I really wanted to know was whether wrongs would be righted, whether people could outgrow their old limitations, if they would get the time to do so or if death would get them first. The book is rather shorter than American Rust. At 237 pages it wasted not a word. It’s a tight book and a fabulous one. Just have a look at the opening paragraphs: "The Rutherford girl had been missing for eight days when Larry Ott returned home and found a monster waiting in his house. It’d stormed the night before over much of the Southeast, flash floods on the news, trees snapped in half and pictures of trailer homes twisted apart. Larry, forty-one years old and single, lived alone in rural Mississippi in his parents’ house, which was now his house, though he couldn’t bring himself to think of it that way. He acted more like a curator, keeping the rooms clean, answering the mail and paying bills, turning on the television at the right times and smiling with the laugh tracks, eating his McDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken to what the networks presented him and then sitting on his front porch as the day bled out of the trees across the field and night settled in, each different, each the same."

  5.00 out of 5

  liliannattel

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