“South, America: A Jack Prine Novel”
Author: Rod Davis
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Pages: 248
Price: $24.95 (Paper)
Before seven on a Sunday morning, in the year 2000, Jack Prine is walking from his apartment to get some coffee and finds a “body … splayed out face down across a busted-up curb in the Faubourg Marigny, downriver of the quarter but not quite in the Bywater.”
Prine is not a cop. As an army intelligence officer he had served in Korea, in the 70s, had recently been in TV news in Dallas, even worked as weekend anchor, and is now a freelance magazine writer in New Orleans and occasionally does “unlicensed PI” work for a divorce lawyer, getting the goods on straying husbands. He practices yoga and lives simply.
All that is over.
Prine reports the body, and later is contacted by Elle Meridian, the sister of the deceased. At drinks at The Napoleon House, “A force radiated off her.” She has “almond shaped, honey-brown eyes,” “her small lips were bee-stung,” and she wears light blue nail polish. The classic femme fatale, Elle Meridian will draw the lonely Prine, quickly in thrall, into adventures and danger he had no notions of.
Terrell Henry Meridian, her brother, was a gay black man, murdered. The police think, simplistically, lover’s quarrel. Elle knows better.
Elle asks Jack to help her claim the body and deal with funeral arrangements. The reader knows she has an agenda, but not what that agenda is. Jack slowly learns Elle’s back story: she and Terrell grew up on the Barnett plantation in Mississippi, where Big Tom Barnett was the patriarch; his son was called Junior. Junior’s son Trey, Tom the third, of course, was a childhood playmate of Elle and Terrell. The relationships existing among Trey, Elle, and Terrell are Deep South gothic. Very little is straight in this novel, most antecedents unclear.
Readers of Southern literature, all the way back to Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom,” will recognize the clues.
From Tuscaloosa, where she is a psychologist and guidance counselor for the U of A, Elle calls Jack for help. Tough guys surely sent by Trey are at her house, but she refuses call the cops: a warning sign, readers realize, even Jack realizes, but the knight errant, partly motivated by courtly love and partly hooked by lust, speeds to help the beautiful lady in distress.
For a good while, the novel turns biracial Deep South road trip. Wherever they go: Oxford, Jackson, Rosedale, they are followed. Violent encounters erupt in the Mississippi woods, unseen, and in New Orleans, where no behavior, however bizarre, seems to be noticed by anyone.
Jack learns Trey is a most unsavory character: inept gambler, fence, crooked art dealer, sexual predator, bankrupt and in debt to mobsters. Elle and Jack are aided by exotic Aunt Lenora, a voudou priestess who uses pigeon blood, cremated human ashes, vials of unnamed scented liquids in her ceremonies. Readers of Davis’ earlier novel, “Corina’s Way,” will remember that Corina is a voudou priestess; Davis also wrote a study of the practice, “American Voudou” (1998).
But this is an action novel: chase, near capture and escape, motels and roadside diners, gunfights, beatings, torture and one revelation after the next.
Each reader will have a personal tolerance for how many episodes are too many.
The past is peeled back in layers, as it should be, leading to the finding of the treasure and a pretty substantial climax at a New Orleans art gallery.
Jack has to call on his military training in firearms and hand-to-hand combat more than once to save them all from a variety of creepy bad guys and, since this is the first Jack Prine novel, he survives, bloody and I hope wiser.
In a recent public talk, Davis revealed he had originally planned “South, America” as a stand- alone novel but very near publication added “A Jack Prine Novel.’’ This makes it a “series” novel with more volumes to come, and, although still a potential winner of mystery writer prizes, not likely to take many literary prizes, however unjust that bias against series novels may be. He also remarked it made the novel less likely to be reviewed.
Well, here it is anyway.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
