Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter von Tom Franklin. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial.

KÖNIGS ERLÄUTERUNGEN SPEZIAL

3128

Textanalyse und Interpretation zu

Tom Franklin

CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER

Patrick Charles

Analyse | Interpretation in englischer Sprache

Zitierte Ausgaben: Franklin, Tom: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Sprachen, 2017. Note: All page references are to the Klett English Edition of the novel (ISBN 978-3-12-579900-4) and refer to the page and line numbers: for example, 191.25 is line 25 on page 191.

Über den Autor dieser Erläuterung: Patrick Charles wurde 1973 in Bournemouth, Südengland, geboren und studierte englische Literatur an der Universität von Newcastle. 1993 zog er nach Berlin, wo er eine Ausbildung zum Buchhändler machte und zehn Jahre lang als Buchhändler arbeitete. Seit 2004 ist er als freiberuflicher Autor von Schulbüchern und Lernhilfen und als Übersetzer im Kulturbereich tätig. Er lebt mit seiner Familie in Berlin.

1. Auflage 2018

ISBN 978-3-8044-4128-6

© 2018 by C. Bange Verlag, 96142 Hollfeld

Alle Rechte vorbehalten!

Titelabbildung: Old pump station on Route 66 © forcdan/fotolia.com

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CONTENT

1. FOREWORD – AT A GLANCE

2. Tom Franklin: LIFE & WORKS

2.1 Biography

2.2 Contemporary Background

The South

Chicago

Race

Class and social status

Religion

2.3 Notes on other works

3. ANALYSES AND INTERPRETATIONS

3.1 Origins and sources

3.2 Summaries

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

thirteen

fourteen

fifteen

sixteen

seventeen

eighteen

nineteen

3.3 Structure

The title

Chronology

Symmetries

Suspense and foreshadowing

Crime fiction and collateral damage

3.4 Characters: Constellations & Characteristics

Larry Ott

Silas Jones

Carl Ott

Ina Jean Ott

Alice Jones

Wallace Stringfellow

Cindy Walker

Other characters

Constellations

3.5 Themes

Memory, the past and secrets

Guilt, responsibility and betrayal

Power

Race: Identity and taboos

Horror and monsters – outsiders

Redemption

3.6 Style and Language

Vivid similes and symbolic imagery

Symbols: The mask and the cabin

Irony

3.7 Interpretations

Agatha Christie and the whodunit

Raymond Chandler and noir

How Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter fits in

4. CRITICAL RECEPTION

5. MATERIALS

The American South

6. SAMPLE EXAM QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Task 1*

Task 2**

Task 3***

Literatur

Edition used for this study guide

About the author

Reviews

Useful Links by Wikipedia

This study guide to Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is designed to provide an easy-to-use overview of the structure, context, themes and characters of the novel. Here is a quick rundown of the most important points.

Part 2 takes a brief look at Tom Franklin and his career.

 Franklin was born in Alabama in 1963. His career as a writer has been defined by the region of the country in which he was born and has always lived.

 Crooked Letter is a crime thriller about two boyhood friends who are in fact half-brothers. Franklin ist closely associated with the American South.

Part 3 offers analyses and interpretations of the novel.

Crooked Letter – Origins and sources

Franklin is a Southern writer: all his published works have been concerned with the history and culture of the American South. Crooked Letter was published in 2010 and was his third and to date most successful novel.

Summaries

Two young boys, Larry and Silas, become friends despite social and family pressure (Larry is white, Silas black) in rural Mississippi in the late 1970s. A girl they are both connected to, Cindy Walker, disappears, feared dead, and suspicion falls on Larry.

Twenty-five years later, Larry is an outcast in the area, and Silas is now a police officer, investigating the disappearance of a local girl, Tina Rutherford. Larry is again a suspect, even after he is found shot and badly wounded in his own home. Silas investigates the crime and is forced to re-examine his own history, and to acknowledge the secrets he has been keeping about Cindy. He had been with her on the night she disappeared and he could have saved Larry from the suspicion which destroyed his family and his life. While investigating the past, Silas also discovers that he and Larry are half-brothers. Silas is badly injured in a showdown with the man who shot Larry and killed Tina. After Silas has confessed about the events of 1982, he and Larry can begin to mend their friendship.

Structure

The novel is concerned with events from the past and their effect on, and reflection in, events occurring in the present day. The narrative takes place in the two time periods, with some chapters taking place entirely in the past, and characters often slipping into long memories which reveal the secrets and events of 25 years ago.

Characters

The arrangement of the characters in Crooked Letter is a little more complex than in a less chronologically complex novel.

Larry Ott

 Larry is an outcast and a loner who comes from a local family.

Silas Jones

 Silas investigates the crimes in the novel and has to acknowledge his guilt for having ruined Larry’s life.

Carl Ott

 Larry’s father had an affair with Alice Jones, and Silas is his son.

Ina Ott

 Larry’s mother is the last of the earlier generation still alive.

Alice Jones

 Silas mother, a beautiful, strong-willed and hard woman.

Wallace Strongfellow

 Wallace kills Tina Rutherford and shoots Larry.

Cindy Walker

 Silas’ girlfriend at the time she disappears.

There are many other characters in the novel.

Themes

The themes in this novel are deeply interconnected: Memory, the past and secrets – Guilt, responsibility and betrayal – Power –

Belonging – Horror and monsters – Redemption.

Style and language

The dialogue in the novel reflects the strong local accent of rural Mississippi, providing a real sense of place and identity. The prose is rich with poetic similes and symbolic passages.

Interpretations

The novel is primarily a crime thriller, and this chapter will look at where the novel fits in with the literary genre and traditions of crime fiction.

Thomas Gerald Franklin (* 1963)

© Ulf ANDERSEN/GAMMA-RAPHO/laif

SUMMARY

Whether he is writing crime fiction or historical novels, Tom Franklin is a regional writer who is closely associated with the American South, specifically the states Alabama and Mississippi. The traditions, lifestyles and landscapes of the South feature prominently in his writing.

The South

The southern states of the USA are very different from the North. Traditional ways of life which were associated for generations with natural factors like different kind of agriculture (the plantations, for example) and the very different climate are combined with historical, political and social factors including slavery, segregation, the American Civil War, widespread religious intensity and a lot of rural poverty. Industrialisation and urbanisation had been northern phenomena long before they began affecting the South.

Franklin addresses many issues of Southern identity and life in Crooked Letter, including racial dynamics, the coherence and claustrophobia of small rural communities, and social problems like drugs, alcoholism and poverty. He also makes efforts to portray the languid atmosphere of the hot and humid climate, and there is a strong awareness of beauty in his descriptions of the landscapes of the South.

Chicago

Chicago has many nicknames, including the “Windy City” – referring to its chilly and raw climate – and the “City of the Big Shoulders”, which is a line taken from Carl Sandburg’s poem Chicago (1916) and reflects the city’s strong working-class and industrial identity. In Crooked Letter, Alice and Silas move from Chicago to Mississippi, which is for Silas like a different world. When Silas talks to Cindy about Chicago he describes an exciting place with raw weather, access to the highest level of national sports, great pizza and much more – a lively, stimulating environment, full of noise and pressure, very different from the slow and quiet rural world of Chabot and Fulsom (p. 243).

Race

Race is a huge issue in American history and culture, and while it is a factor throughout the entire country and throughout all social strata and demographics, it is historically particularly relevant to the Southern states, including Mississippi, where the novel is set.

Slavery and institutionalised white supremacy (the conviction that white people are fundamentally better than dark-skinned people) were defining features of Southern society for many years. The American Civil War has complex origins, but one of the major factors was the push to abolish slavery.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s had many of its defining moments occur in the South, where racial segregation was widespread and efforts to maintain the white supremacist status quo were fiercer and more oppressive than in the North. In a secretive shadowy world, the institutional racism which enforced segregated schools, bathrooms, buses and drinking fountains was accompanied by mob violence and the secret society Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was first formed in the 1860s to overthrow the Republic following the Civil War. The white supremacist identity of the Klan has remained its defining feature throughout the years. The KKK is a secret society, but members are famous for their distinctive uniform of white robes with pointed white hoods. The Klan has been responsible for countless murders, lynchings and assaults on African-Americans and civil rights activists.

Grave of 14-yearold Emmett Till, lynched by a white man.

© picture alliance/AP Photo

Silas had virtually no contact with white people when he was growing up in a peaceful all-black neighbourhood in Chicago (131.8–21). It was only when he came to Mississippi that he encountered white people who would openly call blacks the N-word. As an adult, Silas sees the effects of structural racism, for example when he looks at the courthouse and sees exclusively white lawyers and exclusively black defendants (174.4–6).

Class and social status

The South maintained an almost feudal social system far into the modern era, with powerful, dynastic landowners who ran their vast estates like medieval aristocratic properties, complete with successive generations of servants and, for a long period, slave labour. In Crooked Letter, the clearest example of class and social tensions is combined with racial issues in the idea of “white trash”, specifically Wallace Stringfellow and the Walker family. These are white people who are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, poor, uneducated, unskilled, unemployed, and often associated with drug addiction, alcoholism and domestic abuse. We can see in the character of Wallace how a lifetime of being treated like dirt can make you believe it at some point (“I ain’t worth a shit”, 283.10), but the combination of this sense of worthlessness with Wallace’s emotional and psychological problems makes him a dangerous character. Cindy Walker on the other hand has also been subject to contempt and abuse throughout her young life, but she wants to escape and find a better life.

Religion

Religion in the Deep South has an interesting and diverse history. There is a long tradition of Protestantism, but the predominant denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention. There are also many Methodists.

Religion plays a minor role in Crooked Letter. Larry is a believer, and Wallace’s first memories of Larry are of him in a church. Larry and his mother feel a genuine hunger for religion and must search for congregations which will accept them after Larry becomes the main suspect in the disappearance of Cindy Walker. They are Baptists.

SUMMARY

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was Franklin’s third novel, and is his most successful and famous work.

Poachers

His first published work, this collection of short stories won a major prize in the field of crime fiction (the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Short Story).

Hell at the Breech and Smonk

His first two novels are historical novels, both examples of regional fiction, as they are set in Alabama. Hell at the Breech[1], his debut, was based on actual historical events. Smonk is a wildly over-the-top novel about a brutal rapist and his path of destruction, intended in part as a reaction against or parody of the excessively masculine Southern fiction of established writers like Cormac McCarthy (famous for novels like Blood Meridian – published 1985).

Smonk

has recently been translated into German for the first time and has been receiving a lot of attention for its grotesque, energetic humour and brutality[2].

The Tilted World

Co-written with his wife, this is another historical, regional novel, set in Mississippi in 1927.

SUMMARY

Tom Franklin is widely considered to be a regional, and specifically Southern writer. All of his published work has been set in Mississippi or Alabama, and the region and his experiences there have shaped his work as a writer.

“To write a story, you have to get the details right. You have to convince a reader you know what you’re talking about.”[3]

(Tom Franklin)

Franklin’s personal background in the region and his familiarity with the life, landscape, history, people and feel of the South means that there are traces of his life and experience in his work. This is also true of Crooked Letter: for example, like Larry, he grew up with a father who ran a car repair workshop in a tiny rural community.

He mentions in interviews how much autobiographical detail has slipped into Crooked Letter: “the character of Silas "32" Jones is very loosely based on the sole police officer of the hamlet of Dickinson, Alabama, where I grew up”[4] and “I used a lot of autobiographical stuff for Larry, the mechanic”[5]. These autobiographical details include Larry’s reading habits – when asked in an interview who his favourite writers were and are, Franklin says, “I loved Stephen King and Edgar Rice Burroughs as a kid”[6].

His roots in the South have shaped him as a writer:

“So, yes, the souths made me the writer I am. It taught me to listen to the cadences and rhythms of speech, and to notice the landscape. It also has this defeated feel, a lingering of old sin, that makes it sweet in a rotting kind of way. Much of it is poor, much is rural, and thats an interesting combination, a deep well for stories.”[7]

In the same interview, Franklin talks briefly about the origins of the novel: “Id been wanting to write about a small town police officer, and Id long had the image of a loner mechanic in my mind. When I put the two together, the story began to form.”