In 2019 Snowden Wright published “American Pop,” which I enjoyed immensely. That novel, set in Batesville, Panola County, Mississippi, followed for a century the fortunes of the Forster family in war and politics and their invention of Pancola with its secret ingredient.
Wright has moved his new novel only a short distance, to Meridian, Mississippi, and the action of this murder / private eye story takes only a few weeks, from late 1984 till the second inauguration of Ronald Reagan in January of 1985. It may be morning in America, somewhere, but there is a good deal of darkness in Meridian, here called The Queen City because it was the second largest city in Mississippi. No longer.
Meridian has fallen onto some rough times. Located conveniently on interstates connecting New Orleans, Birmingham and Atlanta, Meridian has become a center for “gambling, bootlegging, drug-trafficking, number-running, loan-sharking, election-rigging, racketeering, prostitution, extortion, protection and assassination.”
This is unpleasant for a lot of the population, but a lawless environment provides steady work for a private detective—in this case Clem (Clementine) Baldwin. Clem’s black mother is deceased, and her white father, a jeweler and receiver of stolen goods, is serving time in Parchman Prison. She has resigned from the police force, disgusted by the racism and corruption, and gets hired by Lenora Coogan to find out who killed her son Turnip, a prisoner in the Lauderdale County jail, which is, inexplicably on the roof of the county courthouse.
Turnip was either pushed off the roof or jumped, or was poisoned while IN jail, or all of it. Clem investigates and learns of course that it is complicated, crosses many socio-political strata, and probably involves the Dixie Mafia. Wright clearly enjoys describing this criminal enterprise, so secret many think it doesn’t exist. The DM we learn is the institutional grandson of the KKK. The foot soldiers are mostly rednecks and bigots, but like the KKK as revealed in Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home,” DM also has members deep in the white upper classes: the lawyer, judge, businessman, real estate developer world.
Clem’s investigations take her to honky-tonks, a trailer park, country mansions, city hall, the local golf club and, as she follows clues around Meridian with her very large, white ex-football player partner Dixon Hicks, the bad guys become increasingly nervous, shoot at them, try to blow them up. The Dixie Mafia, previously “a bunch of untrained bozos,” is now organized into executives, middle management and angry, disillusioned Vietnam vets who know how handle weapons and explosives and how to follow orders. One Mafia manager explains: “America has given us just what we needed: an army.”
