Sometimes a fictional place can come to feel more real than our own hometowns: history runs a little thicker there, relations are all around, past and present mingle and the landscape never quite seems to be at rest. That’s the feeling of reading about Greg Iles’s Mississippi. In his latest novel, the aptly titled Cemetery Road, a DC journalist returns to his small town nestled up against the Mississippi River and takes the helm at the local paper. The machinations of small-town life are laid bare; here the strings of power get pulled at a poker club, a club that has its sites set on bringing a billion dollar Chinese paper mill to the town. It’s an economic boon but not without its costs, not to mention the greased wheels of corruption and even murder. One page of Iles’s work packs in enough backstory and depth of character to populate most books, which makes Cemetery Road that rare thing in contemporary fiction, a truly sweeping crime epic. We caught up with Iles on the release of his new book to ask him a few questions about Mississippi, literary community, life beside the river, and the struggle to save small-town America.
CrimeReads: At the center of this new novel is a small town’s struggle to survive, to thrive economically in an era in which that often seems all but impossible. It’s a noble fight, but on the other hand it’s also what makes this town, this community, vulnerable to corruption and crime. Is that small town conundrum something that’s been gnawing at you? I’ve never seen the dilemma laid out quite so forcefully.
Greg Iles: Since the mid-1980s I’ve been watching Mississippi, particularly the river counties, struggle to survive. It was a slow process for a while, but now it has accelerated. And there’s a sort of tipping point where even self-absorbed people start to feel their hometowns going—passing a point of no return. When that happens, folks start to get desperate. It’s happening in a lot of places in America now. That’s part of the root of the opioid and meth epidemics. People don’t know how to respond to what’s happening around them, and rather than pack up granny and their kids and light out—like the Dust Bowl days—they squat where they are and use drugs to escape the grim reality. So when somebody comes along—in this case a Chinese paper company—and offers what looks like economic salvation, the townspeople are going to be pretty aggressive against anyone who threatens that salvation. Even their own neighbors.
The river itself—the Mississippi—is almost a character in Cemetery Road. It seems to have a kind of agency we don’t usually associate with terrain in fiction. It’s a lot more than landscape. I wondered if you could explain a little the river’s position in the lives of these characters, in their stories, and in this area of country?
Iles: The Mississippi River is too large and profound a thing to deal with in a short answer. Many towns in America are situated on rivers, and those rivers flow through the minds and hearts of all raised beside them. “The River” is surely one of Springsteen’s greatest songs, an American myth—or novel—in three epic verses. But the Mississippi is the greatest river of them all, the aorta of the continent (though it drains the land like a vein, if you want to get technical—as some anal retentive readers do). It’s the setting Mark Twain chose for Huck Finn. And as I mentioned in the book, T.S. Eliot wrote that he was deeply affected by the Mississippi as he grew up beside it. I’m the same, it’s part of me. And everyone I grew up with, no matter where they settled as adults, will tell you they remember exactly what that river looks and feels and smells and tastes like. You stand in two feet of it and sink right into the sand because the water is flowing through it. And if the current gets hold of you… forget it. A lot of bad things have happened along that river in the last three hundred years. More than I could write about in two lifetimes.
Across your different thrillers and series, you’ve never been tied to one particular profession. You’ve written from the perspective of prosecutors, doctors, scientists, FBI agents, and more. Here, your narrator is a journalist, a highly successful one who’s gone from DC back home to Mississippi to run his family’s newspaper. You’ve touched on journalism before but never quite so directly. Why now, and what was it about the profession that you wanted to explore?
Iles: You’re right. I’ve tended to stay away from the more conventional thriller heroes, which are cops, detectives, and spies. I like to deal with crime and psychology through the lens of someone not necessarily trained to handle stress and violence. I also think that some of the smartest people tend to be in different occupations. Journalism is a profession in which “regular people” sometimes confront harrowing situations and can be called upon to make extraordinary choices. There’s a moral dimension to their work, an obligation to discover and report the truth. In this surreal time we’re living through, it might be the most important job in the world. I like Sherlock Holmes, but I love Woodward and Bernstein. I loved my female war photographer character, Jordan Glass from Dead Sleep, and I felt a little of her energy when I was writing Marshall McEwan.
So many of your books touch on the theme of going home—characters returning to hometowns, old haunts, places they never wanted to return to. What is it about that story that holds such power, especially in the realm of crime fiction?
Iles: Thomas Wolfe said “You can’t go home again.” Frost said, “Home is that place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Both those statements are true, as is everything in between. Home, whether you came from a good or bad one, is the cradle of identity for us all. In our era, Don Henley put it pretty well: “Somewhere back there in the dust, that same small town in each of us.” The journey home is always a journey to the well we came from. It brings most of us comfort, but there’s often pain there too. Unfinished business, things left unsaid, old resentments simmering, even scores to be settled. The potential for drama is always there in real life, which makes it a natural milieu for fiction.
While much of the crime genre is currently tailored to be swift reads, you write crime epics—what is it about that big sweeping historical form that pulls at you?
Iles: I’ve written a couple of “normal size” novels in my career, but even my “standard” books tend to run long. One reason is that I tend to write in a granular way. Minute by minute, sometimes. If you go back and study the books, you’ll see that not much time actually passes in them. Natchez Burning took place over something like four days, but it was 800 pages long. I go deep into characters’ psychology, and I also provide dense historical context to my stories. That’s why they feel so real, I think. Some grow out of authentic historical events, such as crimes or wars. And even where my history is invented, I try to make it so real that even historians will wonder whether what I describe might really have happened. The trick when you write as long as I do is to give the novel enough pace so that it never feels slow to the reader. Lonesome Dove is a long book, but when I read it, I wished it were twice as long. That’s how I want my readers to feel.
Your work explores the small crimes within the larger crimes, whether that be a murder that illuminates prejudice, or a long-unpunished crime that illustrates privilege—what is the responsibility of the crime writer when it comes to society’s biggest crimes?
Iles: A review of Don Winslow’s work appeared in the Washington Post today, and the writer mentioned myself and James Ellroy (as well as Winslow) as writers who had written multi-volume works that deal with great crimes central to American life. Winslow with drugs, Ellroy with the assassinations, me with race and the South. I think some writers are content to mine the dark landscape of human nature in small ways, and they do great things with that. But some of us have an almost self-destructive urge to take hold of the big crimes, the ones where actual justice is an impossibility—and try to wrestle them into some sort of comprehensible form. I loved John Le Carre’s Cold War work because in that polarized world, he always showed that when it came to moral compromise, East and West were very much the same. I can only hope that I’ve triggered some people to look at some very old problems from a different angle, and perhaps be willing to accept that we are all culpable in the peculiar historical blindness that continues to drag this country backward.
You’re part of a thriving community of writers working in and writing about Mississippi, a group of authors that works across all kind of styles, genres, traditions, but is rooted in the state. Why is the scene there going so strong?
Iles: My first literary agent was from Oregon, and she had a very simple explanation for why Mississippi has so many good writers. “Great suffering produces great art.” I mention that in a comedic way, but as with all comedy, there’s truth to it. Look at Jesmyn Ward and Angie Thomas, two great new talents, engaging deeply with the world that produced them. Mississippi is a complex place, the “most Southern place on earth,” it is said. It’s also been the whipping boy on race for the rest of the nation for as long as I’ve lived. But the last three years in America have finally exposed that Mississippi has no monopoly on racism. It never did. It’s simply that what is covert elsewhere is overt here. For good or ill, Mississippi is also one of the last states in America still fully suffused with its original identity. The 21st century hasn’t arrived here yet. So the sense of place and identity is so vivid that strangers feel it as soon as they arrive. That’s all a writer can ask for.
