Although I’ve written pseudonymously in the past, my novels, with only two exceptions, have been located in big cities. That includes All of Us, my first A.F. Carter novel, set in New York City. All of Us was a stand-alone, and meant to be, but after finishing the novel I decided to try something entirely new. I began a series located in the fictional Midwestern city of Baxter.
Baxter, its economics dominated by four meat packing plants, never had panache. There was no glamor to be found in a slaughterhouse, and nobody would ever mistake the small city for anything but the industrial town it was. Still, for one generation after another, it offered safety and security to its residents. You worked during the week, collected your pay on Friday, attended church on Sunday. You raised your family, believing that your children would always find employment in the plants or the small businesses that lined Baxter Boulevard. And if necessity made you frugal, there was still a feast on Thanksgiving, presents under the tree on Christmas, birthday gifts for the children.
When the first book in this series, The Yards, begins, the good old days are distant memories. Three of the four plants have closed and the last is about to shut its doors forever. The abandoned plants, located in a neighborhood called the Yards, are windowless and heavily vandalized. Scheduled for demolition, should the city find the money, their skeletal remains are now the habitat of the lost. Junkies, psychotics off their meds, men, women, and children forced from their homes by layoff after layoff. Also vanished is faith in the present or hope for the future. Baxter’s given up on itself. The brightest leave town as soon as they graduate high school. The rest survive as best they can, with the buying and selling of crystal meth and heroin the only growth industries.
Industrial noir, rust belt noir, flyover noir. The setting almost demands one or another of these descriptors. Yet almost a hundred thousand people live in Baxter, despite an unemployment rate double the national average, and that includes the two single mothers, Delia Mariola and Git O’Rourke, who fight the good fight as they wrestle with the barriers to a decent standard of living. But The Yards remains, after all, a crime novel, the villains suitably nefarious, the police work dogged, justice finally achieved. And I might have left it there, with Baxter falling apart, with Git and Delia struggling against the odds. Maybe call it wreckage-of-America noir with a bloated cast of deadenders preying on the defenseless.
I’m drawn to crime fiction’s darker edges, and that includes novels so dark they lack even the faint glow of starlight. Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Willeford. Authors who leave you with no hope, who’ve dehumanized the humans in their work. I read their work, fascinated and repulsed at the same time. Fascinated by unflinching descriptions of what can go wrong inside a human brain. Repulsed by a landscape that appears too bleak for human habitation. Style, here, is irrelevant. Jim Thompson’s pulp fiction approach is relatively crude and mannered. Patricia Highsmith’s writing is sophisticated. Yet Highsmith’s Ripley chills the soul every bit as efficiently as Thompson’s Lily Dillon, the ice-mom in The Grifters. Neither appears violent by nature, yet both are willing to use violence to get whatever it is they happen to want. Violence becomes a simple tool, like a shovel or a food processor.
I admit that I was tempted to follow in that tradition, to leave the city to its hopeless future. Or better, as I intended to write a series, to begin the next book with the terrain firmly established. Decay and desperation for atmosphere, along with residents who first came to this corner of the Midwest in a covered wagon. Now they must compete in a game they cannot win. They must play the role of Sisyphus, pushing on a rock they’ll never get to the top of the hill.
A reviewer once described my work as “defiantly life-affirming.” This comes in part from my respect for the simple perseverance so evident in the lives of single mothers. Beyond that, I tend to like my characters, to find some humanity in the most villainous. Very un-noir of me, and far from the work of Highsmith, Thompson, and Goodis. Maybe far, even, from Chandler and Hammet. Love must be present, no matter the level of dysfunction. Kindness and sympathy as well. Not that simple, if you’re also focused on the evil humans do and not afraid to describe the worst of the worst. Still, at the last, as that first book in the series finished, I gave the people of Baxter, good and bad, a measure of hope.
At the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have remarked, “You have a republic. If you can keep it.” My final word to Baxterites: “You have a city, if you can build it.”
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