This volume contains three early Daniel Woodrell novels, featuring police inspector Rene Shade contending with the criminal goings on in his home town of Saint Bruno. Saint Bruno is a made-up town—a medium-sized city on the lower Mississippi. The closest real-world analog might be Baton Rouge.
Shade has deep roots in Saint Bruno:
Shade had lived in this same building for most of his life, here at the corner of Lafitte and Perry, and learned the hard lessons of the world on these hard bricked streets, within spitting distance of home. This was Frogtown, where the sideburns were longer, the fuses shorter, the skirts higher, and the expectations lower, and he loved it.
All the cops and criminals in St. Bruno grew up together. It’s like a thirties crime melodrama, where the priest and the hoodlum are brothers. How did Rene come out on the right side of the law? Shade is too modest and Woodrell too subtle to claim that it was an ethical choice. Which somehow just makes it all seem that much more noble. It’s a Bogart thing—you don’t ever say why you’re doing the right thing, you just do it.
The outcomes of all three novels are foregone—a crime is committed, and a chain of events is set in motion, with retribution at the end of the chain. In the first two novels, Under the Bright Lights and Muscle for the Wing, Shade is the agent of retribution. In the third, The Ones You Do, Shade’s father, Francis X. Shade, is the one who reluctantly sets things in motion after his wife runs off with a mobster’s money. Francis X. understands that he will be held responsible no matter what he does, so he whacks the mobster upside the head with a bottle of Maker’s Mark just as he’s about to open his safe and discover the missing money, and heads for Saint Bruno. We know how it will end, but what’s pretty cool about everything that comes before is that neither Francis X. nor the mobster, one Lunch Pumphrey, really seems to worry much about that denouement. (“Lunch Pumphrey was called Lunch because if he had a chance to he’d eat yours for you.”) Instead, we see how they live and think, and what we as readers feel is not so much suspense as just a sense of time ticking down. Pumprey is a stone cold killer but his malevolence is just one side of his personality, which has evolved over time into a kind of dispassionate professionalism, and his three-day journey to follow Francis X. to Saint Bruno is actually kind of comical, in an Elmore Leonard sort of way. While stranded overnight in Natchez waiting for his car to be repaired, he meets up with a couple from Iowa, who, as it turns out, are casing him while he is casing them. They are one step too slow and wind up in the trunk of their car at the bottom of the Mississippi.
Daniel Woodrell is my first repeat author in this blog; The Bayou Trilogy is less remarkable than Winter’s Bone, but pretty damn entertaining nevertheless. Since Woodrell has been called a “back-country Shakespeare,” we can see the short novels in The Bayou Trilogy as his answer to the bard’s Henry VI plays—a trio of early works that show the author mastering his craft, each a little bit better than the one before.
