Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter: A Novel
(P.S.)
by Tom Franklin, Harper Perrenial, 2011
Reviewed by Judi Morrel
Authored by Tom Franklin, who won an Edgar
award for an earlier short story collection, the novel Crooked
Letter, Crooked Letter is set in present-day Mississippi and
involves an unsolved cold case from the 1970's. Larry Ott, the
child of lower-middle-class white parents and Silas Jones, the son
of a poor black single mother, were unlikely childhood pals and
high school classmates when tragedy struck. Larry took a girl on a
date and she disappeared, never to be heard from again. Despite any
evidence, Larry was suspected and Silas left town for college.
Twenty-five years later, that disappearance still unsolved, Larry,
now a loner mechanic, and Silas cross paths again. Another girl
disappears, Larry is suspected yet again, but now Silas is the
local constable. The two are forced to examine their broken
friendship and the buried past. While Crooked Letter, Crooked
Letter has a mystery at its core, it is not a mystery novel;
rather, Franklin, who holds the John and Renee Grisham Chair in
Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi, displays some of
the best characteristics of Southern literature with excellent
character development, pitch-perfect dialogue, and unexpected plot
twists. (By the way, the title refers to a pneumonic device used to
teach Southern children how to spell "Mississippi," as in
M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-crooked letter-crooked
letter-I-humpback-humpback-I.)
- Judi Morrel is Professor of Mathematics at Butler
University.