Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in more than two dozen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Ho-Tep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror," and he adapted his short story "Christmas with the Dead" to film hisownself. The film adaptation of his novel Cold in July was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Sundance Channel has adapted his Hap & Leonard novels for television.
Joe R. Lansdale is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.
The detective story is a conservative and largely artificial genre: in life, crimes are almost never revealed the way they do in novels or TV series, the detective is not omniscient, his assistant is not omnipresent, and evidence and material evidence very rarely add up to a clear, unambiguously readable pattern. The author's desire to describe the murder investigation "as is", without embellishment, is capable, in a good case, to turn his book into a production novel, and in a bad case - to break its backbone. In this sense, Joe Lansdale manages to literally walk along the edge: despite the fact that the semantic basis of "Floodplain" is an investigation of a series of brutal murders, this is not a classic detective story, not a production novel, and yet it is still extremely interesting to read.
Perhaps the main resource by which Lansdale manages to achieve this result is the setting: the novel takes place during the Great Depression in the American South. The irresistibly charming, multi-layered, lovingly written atmosphere, unmistakably referring to To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, turns out to be the very magic dust that hides the plot's not even flaws, but the peculiarities and turns “detective without detective” into reading at the same time exciting and pacifying.
One night, a twelve-year-old hero-storyteller named Harry and his younger sister Thomasina, lost in the forest, after long wanderings, go to the banks of the Sabin River and find the half-decayed corpse of a dark-skinned woman with traces of mutilation and torture in the coastal thickets. Having got out of the forest and ran to the house, the children tell about what they saw to their father - a farmer and a hairdresser, who also performs the duties of a constable. The next morning he goes to the crime scene, finds the body and goes with him to a neighboring town, inhabited mainly by blacks, so that a black doctor can perform an autopsy: white doctors refuse to even touch the "carrion". The autopsy shows what, in general, is clear and so: before being killed, the woman was raped, tortured, and then amused with her dead body.
At this point, it may seem that, having hesitated a bit at the beginning, the plot will nevertheless turn the “normal” detective onto the rolled straight line and is about to roll along it measuredly and smoothly. It would seem that we have all the prerequisites for this: a straightforward investigator, completely devoid of racial prejudices (the father of the protagonist), his potential assistant (doctor, shrewd and educated), an inquisitive observer and chronicler - actually Harry himself - and working somewhere on the neighborhood is a maniac (after the first victim, the second naturally appears, and then another and another, and at least two of them will turn out to be white).
But no - none of this will happen. Harry’s father’s investigator will turn out to be useless, and he’s too busy with grueling housework to shine with deduction. The doctor is preoccupied with the affairs of his charges and is too afraid of the Klans to dive into the investigation, especially since a white man may be under suspicion. Long months pass between the murders, and Harry manages to, if not completely forget about what is happening, then at least be distracted by other activities. And even the loud and decisive grandmother of Harry and Thomasina, who comes to visit her daughter and grandchildren and with all her heart wants to find the killer, turns out in this capacity to be little better than her son-in-law - so, at the most decisive moment, she gives in and allows the criminal to leave.
In short, Lansdale deceives us at every point: as soon as we feel that we have guessed the pattern, the rules of the game change and we are again left with nothing. The investigation moves in fits and starts, gets bogged down in the daily routine, is overgrown with irrelevant details. And in general, speaking frankly, all the heroes of "Poima" are much more worried about prolonged rains, which can deprive them of their already meager earnings, than the villainy of a maniac who kills once every six months and chooses women whom no one will miss as an object.
However, as mentioned above, the fact that in the performance of many other authors would cause irritation and suspicion of ineptitude, Lansdale plays exclusively in a plus. At some point, his novel crosses that poorly distinguishable line, beyond which genre literature becomes just literature, without any additional clarifications and definitions, and it remains there. Moreover, this transition occurs naturally and organically, without postmodern winks and pseudo-intellectual tinsel.
You can purchase this book at Amazon.
This article was sponsored by Bart Lipiec
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