On November 28th, we lost Daniel Woodrell, one of the most respected authors. At two Bouchercon conventions where I got to hang out with him, he was surrounded by admirers; not readers, but his fellow authors.
After reading Winter’s Bone, Crime Reads Senior Editor Molly Odintz asked me, “Is everything Daniel Woodrell writes this exquisite?”
Yes. And while it was always in his beautiful, poetic prose, and often dealt with the same class of people on society’s edge, he did it with a range of tone and style.
He often wrote about the place he grew up and resided in, the Missouri Ozarks. The rural section of the state’s southwest was home to a farming and working class who often found themselves becoming the working poor over the last fifty years, only to be hit with first meth, then opioid epidemics. He still lived there during those times at Bouchercon, across the street from a family of meth dealers. He said anytime his wife had a problem with their neighbors, he reminded her, “Make sure they’re unarmed.”
“It was almost as if he was rooted there, like a tree or a vine,” says friend and fellow author Reed Farrel Coleman. “It was as if the place itself spoke through him. And like all great writers, he could separate himself from the place just enough to see it from the outside and give voice to the place itself.”
He broke his own cycle of poverty by dropping out of high school and joining the Marines, happy to have three meals a day. After his stint, he earned a B.A. at the University of Kansas, then becoming a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. At one point, an instructor told him, while he had incredible talent, he couldn’t support himself as a writer since he wrote about the poor. He said that’s why he always used an element of crime.
He initially wrote about Rene Shade, a Louisiana police detective, in what is often referred to as The Bayou Trilogy. Shade was raised by a pool hustler father, and his brother operates a bar that doesn’t always stay on the lawful side of the parish, forcing him to walk an interesting moral line. Reading the three books works as a masterclass on how a new author uses genre to find their voice.
That voice was first applied to the historical novel, Woe to Live On, centered on border ruffians in Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War. Then he went to the modern Ozarks, diving into clans, often criminal ones. Not only did he demonstrate his acclaimed prose style, but his gift for point of view. Give Us A Kiss—the book where he coined the subgenre “county noir”— provided as much humor as it did violence, featuring a loser giving us the cockeyed view of his experience (as he gets more and more out of depth with one unpredictable femme fatale). In Tomato Red, we get everything we need to know about the protagonist in the first line, a brilliantly constructed run-on sentence followed by a kicker of a short second one. He also captures the other player, a young independent woman, so well that his fellow author Megan Abbott joked that Woodrell was once a thirteen-year-old girl. In The Death of Sweet Mister, we follow a young boy in opposition to his mother’s criminal boyfriend, leading to one of the most uncomfortable conclusions.
“I found Daniel’s underlying theme in nearly all of his work to be about family,” explains Coleman. “Not necessarily the family his characters were born into, but the ones they created for themselves or that circumstance created for them.”
Then came his breakthrough, Winter’s Bone. The main character is Ree Dolly, the teenage daughter of a meth cooker, who is taking care of her invalid mother as well as her brother and sister. Like her creator, she plans to escape her situation by joining the military. Her plans come under threat when the local sheriff informs her her father put up the homestead for bail and can’t be found. With the help of her scary, yet fully humanized uncle, Teardrop who is as much out for blood than family assistance, Ree moves through the close-knit clans of her county. Woodrell mainly looks at the women who serve as the backbone of a community where crime, drugs, and unemployment have ruined the men of the society, giving them little to stand on other than violence. It also inspired a great movie that launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence.
“He was poetic, economical, but never cheated his characters or the reader,” said Coleman. “Dennis Lehane said it best, “He wrote high prose about low people and yet never condescended to the people he wrote about.”
Dan didn’t get much of a chance to build on the success of Winter’s Bone, getting hit with illness and health issues. A collection of short stories, The Outlaw Album, came out, followed by The Maid’s Version, a time hopping novel loosely based on an incident in his grandmother’s life. Many held out for another book.
Frank Bill (Donnybrook), a writer in the rural noir tradition, recalls getting to know him at a book event. “He and I and another close friend shared drinks later that night at his hotel bar. Discussing everything. Life. Music. Larry Brown. Writing industry and how fucked up it was. He hated the term country noir that was coined from him during an interview but stuck. The thing about Daniel was and is his writing and how much he influenced other writers. Anyone from Megan Abbott to Dennis Lehane. Myself included. He was a genuine person. Wasn’t a fake. And when you read his books you saw that upon the page, real people with real issues. He was a writer’s writer and can never be replaced.”
“I got to speak with him a few days before he passed,” recalls Reed. “I told him that I knew he felt he was under appreciated, but that I thought of him as a hero. That all the writers I know admired the hell out of him and were all a tiny bit jealous of the magic he possessed. A magic now lost to us forever, but preserved in his work.”
