Buster wasn’t always right, and he gave mixed answers sometimes, but the thing that sticks with me, the thing that always seems right, was what he said about how life isn’t always satisfactory, and that in the end, dirt and flesh are pretty much the same.
- Title: A Fine Dark Line
- Author: Joe R. Lansdale
- Genre: Mystery/Thriller
- Year: 2003
In A Fine Dark Line Joe R. Lansdale gives us a mystery wrapped in a coming-of-age tale wrapped inside an exploration of the dark truths that lurk beneath the surface of one small town. Dewmont, Texas, 1958, a town divided along racial and class lines, the place where 13-year-old Stanley Mitchel lives with his family inside a movie screen. The Dew Drop Drive-In is the family business, and its screen is a tall block building the Mitchels’ call home. Stanley is like a lot of other kids his age, he does his chores, rides his bike, plays with his dog Nub out in the woods — and it’s out in the woods one day that he makes a discovery that will embroil him in an long-buried Dewmont mystery, and herald the end of his innocence.
As Stanley tells us: “At thirteen years old, I was the youngest of the Mitchel clan, and not a sophisticated thirteen at that. I was as unaware of the ways of the world as a pig is of cutlery and table manners. I thought sex came after the number five and before the number seven.” What Stanley and Nub discover in the woods that day is the remains of a house, a veritable mansion, burned down and overtaken by the forest. Stanley also finds a metal box containing love letters between an ‘M’ and ‘J.’ It’s a diverting mystery, one he shares with his sister Callie, but the investigation soon takes on a life of it’s own with the entrance of Buster Abbot Lighthorse Smith.
Buster is the Dew Drop’s projectionist. He’s in his seventies, black, alcoholic, and moody as hell. He also loves a mystery, and sorely misses his days as an Indian lawman, a Seminole Lighthorse. Buster is the sort of character Lansdale excels at, one that plays against stereotype but is never merely just a way of getting a point across — he’s a guy that knew Tom Mix and Bulldogging Bill Picket, has read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, could tell you the right way to paint a UFO alien, and has even executed a man under Indian law. He opens Stanley’s eyes to skepticism, to Sherlock Holmes, and to a way of seeing the world that goes beyond the confines of his small town upbringing.
The mysterious letters lead Stanley and Buster to investigate the Stilwind family, whose house it was that burned down all those years ago, and whose front yard is now the Mitchel’s drive-in. On the way they go through old newspapers and ‘borrowed’ police reports, tangle with rough customers, and use their discoveries to alleviate a current crisis confronting Stanley’s family. Lansdale keeps the reader guessing until the end, and effortlessly draws all the threads of his story together in an unexpected and satisfying way.
A Fine Dark Line manages to be at once nostalgic, and unflinching, in its look at this time and place. Lansdale deals especially well with matters of race in the segregation-era south, and shows the many permutations racism takes, from the casual language of bigotry to the separate standards of justice between the black and white community of Dewmont. Most telling are the racist assumptions of otherwise good and fair-minded people, such as Stanley’s father, and Lansdale’s nuanced portrait of the way such dehumanizing notions can permeate all aspects of society and family life are one of the strongest features of this novel. Fans of Lansdale know too that he is also a master of dialect and style, and in A Fine Dark Line he’s is at his characteristic best, evoking the period and the character of Stanley and the others he encounters in this drama with the sort of virtuosity one expects from the badass balladeer of East Texas.
Lansdale fans are no strangers to the gruesome, the vicious, and the just plain nasty, but A Fine Dark Line steps back a bit from some of his most horrific and gross modes of story telling — though fair warning: if you can’t take violence in fiction, Lansdale isn’t really for you. But Lansdale often goes beyond just giving us the bad to show us the best of what people are capable of, and A Fine Dark Line is really a morality tale at heart, one that shows humanity at its best, worst, and most downright bizarre. There are few American writers that write with such distinctively American voices in their fiction, and as Lansdale’s work matures it is quite evident that he is one of a few select writers who transcend genre to give us instead a piece of personal reality with every new story.
