Detective fiction needs a shot in the arm every now and again. That was the feeling of reading Stephen Mack Jones’s 2017 debut, August Snow, which introduced its eponymous hero to the world—August Snow, a former Detroit cop who banked a $12 million wrongful dismissal suit against the force and now finds himself with time on his hands and a habit of getting involved in neighborhood business. He’s a private eye of a sort, a man with a keen sense of justice, investigative skills, a distaste for the powerful and entrenched, a side business in home restoration, and a deep and abiding love for the city of Detroit. Snow’s home base is Mexicantown (he’s the son of an African-American father and a Mexican-American mother), which is under threat is his new novel, Lives Laid Away, as stories go around town about ICE raids on mom and pop shops and the body of a young Latin woman floating up in the Detroit River. For Snow, it’s an attack on the community and the people he loves. In classic detective tradition, the case proves a deeply entangled conspiracy pointing all the way up to the city’s highest echelons of power.
While only two novels deep, the August Snow series is as promising as any crime fiction to come around in a long while, tapping into the iconoclasm and social justice streaks of midcentury noirs, but taking them in a modern direction, exposing human trafficking rings, abuses of immigrant communities, gentrification, and economic declines and revivals. It’s heady, exhilarating stuff. I reached out to Stephen Mack Jones to talk about the new book, working class heroes, and what makes Detroit a perfect city for crime fiction.
Dwyer Murphy: Borderlands have always been a big part of crime fiction—whether we’re talking stories about narcotraffickers, Scandinavian cops, or Eastern bloc divided cities. I think a lot of people forget Detroit is right there on the border. That’s a big part of Lives Laid Away. Does Detroit share qualities with other border towns?
Stephen Mack Jones: Here’s the thing, Dwyer: Michigan has over 3,000 miles of shoreline courtesy of the Great Lakes. More shoreline than any other state, save for Alaska. And a lot of that fresh water is shared with Ontario, Canada. Bottom line is, the problems and challenges you might think unique to border states like New Mexico, Texas and Arizona are right here—just add 95,000 square miles of water. Michigan in general and Detroit specifically have long been a major hub for human trafficking, contraband, etc. And while the media and the government obsess over southern border walls, Michigan and again specifically Detroit are major entry points for the undocumented who, at the invite of the Canadian government, have worked the large Canadian farms and, at the end of a season, choose to risk it all in pursuit of the still potent promise and alluring mythology of the “American Dream.”
I look at the contemporary crime fiction landscape and can’t find another hero with as ambivalent a relationship to the police as August Snow. It’s beyond complex. In a lot of ways, it reflects the community’s relationship to the police, too. Is that something you set out to explore when you started the series?
Yeah, August has a very complicated relationship with the Detroit Police Department. I mean, what happens when you get booted from a job you loved and felt you were exceptionally good at? I personally know that kind of experience—that confusion, bitterness, anger and embarrassment, spiraling and crisscrossing in your head, pressing down on your soul. All because you didn’t kiss the right butt or shake the right hand. Being a political pariah is like having a ghost riding your back; you know it’s there, but you can’t see it and no one else wants to acknowledge its existence. Add to this the ambivalence many communities of color have felt over the generations toward law enforcement. Suddenly, August finds himself in some sort of nether land. Somewhere between loving the law—seeing its great potential—and knowing the law doesn’t necessarily equate with justice. It’s a relationship typified by his often uncomfortable and jagged relationship with Detective Captain Leo Cowling. It’s easy to say the two don’t get along. But frankly, I think August is a bit envious of Cowling because Cowling is still part of the Brotherhood of Blue.
Would you identify August Snow in the tradition of “working class heroes”? That kind of feeling for the community seems to be one of his central characteristics.
I’d say that’s a fair assessment, Dwyer. I come from a blue-collar background. The thing I think some people forget sometimes is how aspirational blue-collar communities are. My dad worked at GM’s Oldsmobile for nearly forty-years, blue-collar, skilled tradesman tinsmith. Among the many things he used to tell my brother and I was, “I’m not working at that place just to have you follow me into a damned factory.” Blue-collar is often romanticized. The “backbone of the middle-class.” Nobody ever talks about the backs that have been broken in an effort to lift their children above the poisoned air of a factory. The deafening noise and limb-crushing machinery. August was born and raised in a blue-collar community. A community that values hard work, sincere effort and vision for a better life. It’s who he is.
August’s African-American and Mexican heritages are both very important to him. That’s not an identity we’ve seen explored in fiction often. Who would you say are some of August’s heroes? The parts of his heritage that mean the most to him?
Frankly, I don’t think August sees a cultural dichotomy in himself. There’s no line in him that divides the black half from the Mexican-American half. As far as he’s concerned, he got the best of what both cultures offer—from food and literature, to configurations of language. As to his heroes—surprise!—he’s a lot like me: His biggest heroes will always be his folks. His mom and dad. The people who heavily invested in setting him on a true-north path in life. Beyond his parents, I’d say his heroes are people who have stood up in life. People like Sitting Bull and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Miss Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez and General Colin Powell and Frieda Kahlo, et al.
These books emanate a warm feeling toward so many pockets of Detroit. Were there neighborhoods or locales that you really wanted to memorialize here, places you felt like you just had to get right and to do them justice?
First and foremost, I love Mexicantown! Southwest Detroit, man! The food, the people—it doesn’t get much more genuine and embracing than that. Since Detroit’s on the rise, I worry about so-called “gentrification”—some folks are referring to Mexicantown as “East Corktown” and, baby, that just ain’t right. Ever hear of a school called Cristo Rey High School? This school is like a high-school Notre Dame, Harvard or Princeton for middle-class and underprivileged kids! Their graduation rate, college enrollment and college scholarship rates are off the freakin’ charts! I’ve been invited to talk there twice and every time I leave thinking, “My God! These kids are smarter and more driven than I’ll ever be!” Go Wolves! I also love Farmington/ Farmington Hills, a couple miles northwest of Detroit. Nothing like the cheap movies and buttered popcorn at the Civic Theatre. Great place to raise kids. Lots of land, beautiful parks. They truly support the arts. And in the summer, nothing like the ice cream at Silver Dairy! Hell, I might even stop for a dollar cone during a Polar Vortex.
Writing crime fiction in Detroit, does the legacy of Elmore Leonard loom large?
Oh, yeah! Elmore Leonard and Loren Estelman! I never had the opportunity to meet Mr. Leonard, but I have met Mr. Estelman—what a gracious, generous gentleman. Helluva writer!
What is it about the city that lends itself so well to a good, wild crime novel?
Everything crashes, collides, sparks, rips, melds, morphs, connects and disconnects here almost on an almost hourly basis: cultures, religions, politics, ethnicities, music, food, drink, upper class, middle class, no class and raggedy-ass. It’s a town that’s been knocked down, made cruel fun of, stereotyped, blood-typed and written off. As I like to say, Detroit may have taken a right cross to the chin that sent it to the mat—but never for a full count. Next thing you know, we’re on our feet and we got a lightning fast combination coming in for your solar plexus and jaw. This is a tough town. It’s also a generous town.
In Lives Laid Away, immigration raids and crackdowns are really blows against working class communities and families, a nasty tear at the social fabric, something the characters have to band against to oppose. Was there some impetus or event in the community, something you saw or read about, that spurred you to write about this and to make it the centerpiece of a novel?
The impetus was the inescapable flood of news—television, newspaper, online, radio—illustrating in graphic and ugly detail how we’re losing the humanity—the compassion—we as Americans were once known for. That so-called “shining beacon on a hill.” Families being separated. Kids in cages. Agents eating at Mexican restaurants and instead of paying the bill, they arrest the cook that just fed them (this happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan.) The institutional racism we once quietly acknowledged as existing now shouts and roars and screams in your face. In Lives Laid Away, I wanted to address all of this, but I didn’t want to stand on a political soapbox with a megaphone. I wanted to communicate the street-level loss and cruelty and pain of this altered reality we’re all upside down in.
Reading this burgeoning series, the closest books I think of in terms of the atmosphere are Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde novels—something about that close-knit, going-way-back working class vibe that makes sense whether it’s Havana or Detroit. I wondered if there are other writers you look to for inspiration, or books you think resonate with your work in interesting ways?
Leonardo Padura’s Mario Conde novels? I’m not familiar with him. Gee, thanks, Dwyer! Now I have to sneak more book purchases past my wife! I’ve always loved poetry—the Spanish and Mexican poets. Folks like Federico Garcia Lorca and Octavio Paz. Love—absolutely love!—Nikki Giovanni and Bob Kaufman. Rereading Kurt Vonnegut or Agatha Christie always goes well with a good bourbon. These days, I’m like a dog waiting at the door for the next James Benn “Billy Boyle” World War II mystery or Timothy Hallinan “Junior Bender” misadventure. Right now, I’m making my eyes bleed and hands shake with S.A. Cosby’s tough-minded My Darkest Prayer. I think maybe I should make some time to get back with Ray Bradbury and Ursula La Guin. They may have to wait until this third August Snow is with my publisher for care, feeding and a fresh nappy…
