“Pitchfork and Darnel burst through the scuffed motel door like two barrels of buckshot.” That’s the opening sentence to “Hill Clan Cross,” the first story in Frank Bill’s debut collection, Crimes in Southern Indiana. These pedal to the metal paced stories feature hard luck men and women doing nasty things to each other or getting revenge for nasty things done to them, which is what one hopes for in a good noir tale. Bill gives a fresh take on the hard boiled formula by setting these stories, as the title of the book indicates, in rural southern Indiana, where the old ways of farming, factory work, hunting, fishing and drinking have been disrupted by economic failure and the scourge of meth addiction (one of the stories is aptly named, “Amphetamine Twitch”). And as always in a noir scenario, fate takes its inevitable toll.
Many of Bill’s characters have been cast adrift by the closed factories and failed farms of that region and have moved into other money making ventures such as cooking meth or dog fighting. Some of the protagonists are Vietnam or Afghan war vets with the battles still raging in their heads, hopped up and on the hunt. One of the most memorable characters is a conservation officer with a failing marriage, a drinking problem, and a very bad day at work (I’d love to see a full novel featuring Conservation Officer Moon). Another fascinating fellow is a member of the violent Los Angeles-based Mara Salvatrucha gang setting up an outpost in the rotting heartland while seeking to siphon off enough money to get out of the thug life.
While each of these stories are self contained, many of them are interlinked and function like cinematic mini novels with not a wasted word (“Everything exploded like flashbulbs across the top of an old Polaroid camera in Everett’s mind as he stood scrubbing the red from within the cracks of his hand’s life line”; “Loss lubricated the sixteen-by-sixteen pit where four canine legs twitched muscle beneath soiled fur”). Most of them clock in at under twenty pages and hurtle along way over the speed limit to their violent (although not always unhappy) conclusions.
Readers of Daniel Woodrell, Elmore Leonard and James M. Cain are advised to pick up Crimes in Southern Indiana and discover a new voice.
I’m a Frank Bill fan. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Oh, and by the way, Pitchfork and Darnel are in for some big trouble.
