This is the chapter I wrote on Daniel Woodrell for my 2006 book, Back To The Badlands

 

Most places I’ve been in the States I know a fair few people who’ve been there too. It’s easy enough, even in Wales, to find people who’ve spent time in Miami or Los Angeles or Chicago. Even with the more out of the way places, like Louisiana’s Cajun country, I know one or two Brits, and plenty of Americans, who’ve been there.

 

The Ozarks are a different matter. No one goes there from Britain, and the only Americans I know who’ve been there are working musicians who will grudgingly admit to having passed through, but clearly don’t want to dwell on it.

 

Inasmuch as the Ozarks have any public profile or place in the national myth, it’s as a Deliverance-style backwoods place, full of illiterate rednecks fishing and drinking moonshine and inter-marrying. The simple fact is that the Ozark Mountains are a bit of America that the world at large has decided to pass by, a part yet to be Starbucked.

 

I flew into St Louis, gateway airport to the Ozarks, on a Sunday afternoon. The flight from Austin via Houston was unremarkable apart from the providing the most egregious example yet of a disturbing new trend I’ve spotted over the past weeks. That trend is the rise of the comedy airline crew. Maybe it’s because the new wave of low cost airlines I’ve been traveling with feel they need to mark themselves out from the old school Pan-Am tradition, but wackiness seems to be the order of the day.

 

No one seems able to give the safety instructions without inserting a joke or two. Today’s stewardess, a thirty something black woman, decides to take it to the next level and sings the damn thing cabaret style. And the when she’s done with singing she inserts a line about ‘what to do in the eventuality that our flight becomes a cruise’. Which is quite funny, I think, but seems liable to alarm the more nervous passenger.

 

Anyway, the flight didn’t become a cruise and the airport is near deserted on a hot Sunday afternoon, and in short order I pick up a car and head west out of St Louis, following I-44, the freeway that has replaced the old Route 66. Occasional billboards advertise Route 66 museums. Another one, fifty miles or so out of St Louis, and in the middle of nowhere, advertises a sex shop. A mile or so later yet another billboard exhorts drivers to forswear sex shops in favour of the Lord. I’m definitely entering the heartlands now.

 

The drive flies by for a while as I tune into an AM station that plays a really excellent selection of sixties and seventies country music, all the Loretta Lynn and George Jones and Porter Wagoner you never hear on regular country radio anymore.

Reception starts to fade out, however, as I reach Rolla and turn off the freeway to head south into the Ozarks.

 

The Ozark Mountain region is for the most part surprisingly un-mountainous, things get a bit steeper over the border into Arkansas but so far it’s the Ozark gentle hills that I’m driving through, passing small towns whose every store seems to sell agricultural hardware, trying to find something on the radio that isn’t hair metal, and finally landing up in West Plains, Missouri, the small town where the Woodrell family have lived for generations.

 

I first came here seven or eight years ago. I was on a trip to Branson Missouri, a peculiar resort town devoted to the music time forgot (Andy Williams has a theater there, so does Bobby ‘Blue Velvet’ Vinton and Jim ‘Spider and Snakes’ Stafford, there’s a whole resort devoted to the legacy of Lawrence Welk, etc,etc) to write a travel piece. It’s a bit of a travel section staple, the story in which a snotty person from London or New York goes to Branson and is horrified by its kitschiness and bible belt values. I’m sure that sort of thing is what the commissioning editor was expecting when she gave me the gig. In the end, being a perverse sort of feller, I quite liked it. I even quite liked the Osmonds On Ice (though I was running a fair old fever at the time, so I may have been hallucinating)

 

Anyway, I had two ulterior motives for taking the gig. One was to go and see the great Merle Haggard being inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall Of Fame, over in Muskogee. The second was to go and visit the guy whose then current novel, Tomato Red, had established him, in my mind, as one of the very best writers, in or out of crime fiction, in America.

 

Back then, West Plains seemed like a place on the verge of closing down. Or at least, as with so many small American towns, in danger of completely losing its downtown. I stayed in a very basic motel called, imaginatively enough, the West Plains Motel, and was entertained to discover that it was on Porter Wagoner Boulevard, named after the town’s most famous son. It was on the edge of the downtown area, which was centred around a charming square that looked like the setting for an old-time folksy small town America movie, except for the fact that most of the shops seemed to be either out of business or going that way fast. There was a classic little lunch counter, the Ozark Café, which looked like it hadn’t been touched since the 1930s, an uninspiring second hand bookstore and not a great deal else.

 

Woodrell lived on the south side of town, up the hill in a neighbourhood whose demographic tilted more towards the poor white crystal meth consumer than the leading American novelist. Dan and his partner and fellow writer, Katie Estill, lived next door to a couple who spent much of their times trying to kill each other after sampling their own home made crystal meth, and were wondering whether the upsides of living there -  having a nice and cheap house surrounded by plenty of greenery - were outweighed by the neighbourhood going to hell factor. They took me out for dinner to a place called the Northfork Steakhouse, and were pretty adamant that we should leave well before closing time, or things could get seriously ugly.

 

Eight years on things have changed. For starters, as I cruise down Porter Wagoner Boulevard looking for my West Plains home away for home, I find myself passing a shiny new Holiday Inn and an even newer and shinier Super 8 Motel, before arriving at the West Plains Motel. This place has not got any shinier since my last visit. The room may even smell slightly worse than the one in Austin. I can’t be bothered to complain though, as I’ve been traveling all day.

 

So I dump my bags, call Daniel Woodrell and head up to the house: turns out they haven’t moved after all. On the way I pass through the central square. It’s definitely looking shinier: there’s even some kid of a wine bar / restaurant there. There’s no sign of a Starbucks though.

 

Dan Woodrell’s place is just as green and charming as before and when Dan comes out to meet the car he tells me that it’s also a lot quieter, as the previous neighbors have moved out.

 

And it’s not only outside that things have improved. Katie has heard this very day that her latest novel has been accepted by St Martin’s Press. This is big news. Katie was at the esteemed writing school at Iowa with Dan in the early 1980s – that’s where they met - and since then they’ve both been struggling to make their way as writers. Dan has had plenty of ups and downs but has, at least, been consistently published. Katie, by contrast, didn’t get her first book published till 2000, and then by a small, though high quality, imprint. So, to sell a book to a mainstream publisher, after twenty years of work, is no small deal.

 

We have a few drinks to celebrate, catch up on the last half dozen or so years, talk a bit about Welsh literature (bizarrely enough, a major current interest of Dan’s) and indeed about Wales itself. And then its ten o’clock and I’m flagging, two airplanes and a two hundred mile drive having taken their toll, and it’s back to the motel where I’m tired enough not to notice the smell till morning, when I decide that I can maybe stretch to the forty bucks a night the Super 8 across the road is charging, and check myself out.

 

I was planning on stopping for breakfast at the Ozark Café so I park along the street from it. But when I get up close there’s a sign in the window saying it’s closed indefinitely. Darn. Across the street, though, where the not-very-good second-hand bookstore used to be, there’s a place called Java Jabez, which looks to be attempting to bring a bit of Seattle’s caffeine sophistication to the Ozarks.

 

This may be a little over adventurous, as it’s completely empty when I walk in. I suspect I can see why when I sit down, scan the menu and find such unpromising attempts at sophistication as eggs with a special sauce, the special sauce in question featuring both habanero peppers and raspberries. Dear God, what happened to you middle America?

 

A very indifferent plate of waffles and bacon later, I’m back out on the street and heading round to Dan’s where he’s ready and waiting to take me on a tour of his fictional world.

 

We start off by driving round Dan’s own neighbourhood. He points out the rundown little houses where the characters from Tomato Red lived, the cemetery in which the characters from The Death Of Sweet Mister lived, and so on. As we drive Dan talks about his own family that had been here for generations and the ancient feuds that are a feature of small town life. This is a poor town, the average income is well below the national average, but it’s clearly a well ordered and sedate one. There are plenty of churches and very few bars. Indeed for years the town was dry, and I’d been struck by the absolute lack of anywhere to get a drink when I’d driven back to the motel the night before. Even the Northfork Steakhouse, an infamous trouble spot when I’d been here last, has now closed down.

 

It’s also a very white town. I ask Dan whether it was always that way, and he says not exactly, and points in the general direction of an area that used to be called, with exquisite racial sensitivity, ‘N***** Hill.’ There had been a black community living there since civil war times, tolerated, though most certainly not integrated. Dan’s father, he tells me, was the only paper boy prepared to deliver to N***** Hill. Then came the civil rights era and the spectre of compulsory integration.

 

This was something the white people of West Plains were never going to stand for. They were not prepared to share their lunch counters with black people or see their kids going to school with black kids. However the might of the Supreme Court was ranged against them, so they needed to come up with a solution.

 

They decided N***** Hill should be modernized, as befits a new era, and while the modernisation was taking place, why naturally all the black people would have to move somewhere else, to St Louis or Memphis ideally. ‘Basically’, Dan says, ‘they railroaded them out of town’. And those that stayed tended to meet darker fates yet.

 

This is not a complete surprise if you’ve read Woodrell’s work. While his love of his home town is clear, so too is his awareness of the darkness and intolerance of small town life, never more vividly than in the climax to Tomato Red. Woodrell’s Ozarks are not a bolthole from the outside world, they’re a microcosm of its hates and fears.

 

Next, we head out of town a few miles, down ever smaller country roads, till we’re motoring through a valley lined with down-at-heel houses, mostly spaced well apart but occasionally clustering together. There’s an air of the gypsy camp about the place. It’s called Collinsville, Dan tells me, and it’s the inspiration for the place where his new novel, Winter’s Bone, is set.

 

Pretty much everyone who lives in Collinsville, a place you’d be hard pressed to find on any map, is part of the Collins clan. And it’s been that way for generations. The origins of the Collinses are unclear. Dan offers the theory that they may originally be mixed race, like the Melungeons of Appalachia (a whole other story and one well worth googling), but he wouldn’t advise telling them that.

 

The Collinses are the model for the Dolly clan who first appeared in Give Us A Kiss and move to centre stage in Winter’s Bone. They’re a lawless bunch, or at least, the laws they answer to are not those of the land. Driving through on the one road in or out we’re attracting our share of curious looks, even on a benign late summer morning. And before long Woodrell hits the gas and moves us along. He’s uneasy with the notion of showing people around the deprivation he uses in his work. There’s something uncomfortably exploitative about it. I know this myself from taking people around the Cardiff housing estate much of my work is set in. It makes me wonder if I have any right to represent these people’s lives, if you don’t actually live amongst them – no matter that, like Dan, I live pretty close by, in a neighbourhood that is itself hardly posh.

 

The answer I suppose has to be in the writing itself. Whether it does justice to the lives of the people concerned. And Dan’s most certainly does. Winter’s Bone is a wonderful book, as beautiful and harsh and indelibly of its people as an Appalachian folk song.

 

And it’s not all deprivation here either: amongst the run-down shacks and trailers there’s the occasional smart house belonging to one of the Collins success stories. What strikes me most though is that with a lot of writers, crime writers in particular, the places they write about are obviously dramatic - inner city ghettoes, border crossings, etc - and their work does a more or less good job in representing them, but tends not to surpass the reality. With Dan Woodrell it’s the other way round. Collinsville is apparently mundane, it’s only in his fiction that it becomes mythical, elemental.

 

All in all it’s too nice a day to be dwelling on deprivation anyway, so Dan decides to show me some of the places he loves. We head further out into the countryside, follow tracks down to a river, he points out a patch of land he and Katie had nearly bought, thinking they wanted to really get away from it all. Now he’s not so sure whether that’s the right thing to do.

 

Seeing the river has given Dan an idea, so we carry on driving till we come to a place called Dawt Mill, where the river is dammed up to provide a swimming hole, and he suggests we jump in. Which seems like a good idea. After all, as Doyle Redmond, the narrator of Give Us A Kiss, says ‘every flow of water has a stone lining in the Ozarks and you never know when you’ll have the urge to dive in someplace’. The water is every bit as cold as you expect river water to be, but the sun is hot and the setting as tranquil as all get out.

 

By the time we’ve dried off and got back on the road it’s time for something to eat. The Ozarks aren’t exactly over burdened with quality dining options – looking at a list of restaurants in West Plain is like reviewing a roll call of America’s family friendly chain restaurants – so after a moment’s consideration Dan decides to head for somewhere called TJ’s Hickory House.

 

Along the way we stop off at a roadside graveyard with a significant Woodrell population, before pulling up outside TJ’s.  It’s a pretty standard roadhouse: check tablecloths, domestic beer and burgers. But the waitress is friendly, and the dark and cool are welcome after the heat outside, and it’s a good space to get to talking about Dan’s career to date, starting with his upbringing:

 

“I was born here in West Plains,” he tells me, “well the nearest hospital was Springfield so that’s actually where I was born. We lived here till I was one. Then my dad, like so many others round here, needed to get a job, so we moved to the St. Louis area. I lived in St Charles till I was 15. It’s been swallowed by the metropolis since then, but at the time it had its own distinctive character. The area that’s all casinos now is where I learned to swim, in the Missouri River sloughs. Hundreds of bums lived in the thickets near there, they had a bum village, rigged up ceilings in the trees and so on. It was a French town originally, you can still see that in the main street. It was a blue collar town, it had a reputation for being kind of handy, there were quite a few fistfights, a little rougher than some places. I know my mother had trouble with it, compared to here.

 

“My mom was mostly at home. When I was about five she started working in the hospital as a receptionist. My dad sold metal and went to night school at Washington University. Then, when he graduated, he suddenly became an executive and  transferred us to Kansas City where we had a moment of modest prosperity. Then it was over. He got into a political thing with his boss and he lost, lost his job as well. He was at an age when it wasn’t easy to catch back on. He was bitter and he drank. And he never did recover.”

 

The move to Kansas City, then, full of promise though it had been at first, was not a happy one: “I lived in Kansas City for two years and I hated it, So much so that I left high school and joined the Marines the week I turned seventeen. I said I’ll go to Vietnam before I spend another week in the fucking suburb. By then I’d been in a little trouble, so my mom and dad said maybe it’s for the best. And it’s a kind of family tradition: my dad and his brother had the same general trajectory of life.”

 

But the Marines too failed to quell the young Woodrell’s ornery spirit: “I liked my fellow marines. In the main they were a rough and tumble but democratic bunch. I didn’t like pointless orders. They’d do things like march you into a wall to show your fidelity and obedience, I sort of liked it at first but you get tired of it pretty quick. Then I got into a little trouble again. I was on the island of Guam working guard duty in the jungle. The last Japanese guy from WW2 was still running loose out there. He was discovered after I came home. He said there had been others but he hadn’t seen them in a long time! Anyway, after 18 months I got into some drug trouble. By then I’d turned 18 and a lot of guys I knew were very salty guys who’d been in Vietnam. They were older, faster, more sophisticated in their vices than I could have hoped to have been at that age, at least without their guidance. But with their guidance I was rapidly in over my head on the recreational drug side of things.

 

‘The authorities asked me if I’d like to be rehabilitated. I said OK. They said are you going to mess with this drug or that drug? I said I’m not interested in those particularly. Then they said ‘what about pot?’ I said ‘I ain’t stopping pot. That would be crazy.’ So they discharged me. Pronounced anti-social tendencies. I thought at the height of Vietnam to be labeled anti-social by the marine corps was kind of interesting.”

 

And, as with many veterans, it took Woodrell a while to settle down in civilian life: “I turned 19 shortly after I got out. Not many jobs around. When I came home to Kansas City everybody I knew was using heroin, which they hadn’t been when I left. I said I’m going to the college furthest from here that I can still get state tuition under the GI bill, and that was Fort Hay Kansas State about 300 miles west. So I was out there for almost three years, but I wasn’t serious about it. I went off on extended hitch hiking tours a couple of times, missed all the finals. I was walking across the campus one time when a van pulled up with a bunch of people I knew. They said ‘where you going?’ I said ‘to take my finals’. They said ‘well we’re going to Colorado and we’ve got a brick of Lebanese hash’. And boom. Poor impulse control.”

 

Gradually though Woodrell started to settle down. He returned to Kansas City and went back to college, studying literature. While he was there he wrote some short stories: “I won a competition with the first one I ever wrote. Which gave me an unnatural notion of how easy this was going to be. The next year I won a bigger  competition and the same the next year and I thought I was on to something. I knew what I wanted to do now, though it still seemed ridiculous.”

 

Why ridiculous? Mostly because Woodrell had not grown up around literary culture: “I had only by accident read what you’d call serious literature before I went to KU. My mother pushed me on Twain so I read Twain all my life. I stumbled on Nelson Algren by accident. His stuff was over my head but I liked it. So Algren and Twain were the first two writers that really resonated for me. It was only at KU that I read Hemingway and the rest.”

 

Convinced that he’d found a vocation Woodrell applied to the Creative Writing School at Iowa, perhaps the most prestigious in the US. Woodrell was accepted but he’s less than convinced it deserves its exalted reputation: “I really enjoyed most of my fellow students and I met Katie there. But I didn’t think most of the teachers amounted to much as teachers, and I didn’t like the administration at all. I was asked to leave at one point. I didn’t come away with any letters of recommendation and I’ve never been invited back, unlike almost everyone else I know. But I did get my Masters. And what was crucial there, was there were students from a lot of elite schools there, and you got to measure self against them. So if you had any provincial doubts about whether you could compete with them head on, well, I found that you could. But you weren’t going to win a decision, it had to be a knockout or you’d lose. So that motivated me ever since.”

 

Dan and Katie graduated in 1983. Dan had written a short story called Woe To Live on while he was at Iowa, set during the Civil War in Missouri and telling the story of Quantrill’s Raiders. He knew it was a story he wanted to turn into a novel. But at that time he didn’t feel quite ready to write it. Instead he embarked on a crime novel:

 

“I wrote Under The Bright Lights just to see if I could write a novel. I wasn’t expecting to go down that route as a writer per se, but it interested me. I’d always liked Chandler. I liked Elmore Leonard a lot, those early ones. I really used to love William McIlvanney. I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. Also the point of view, the attitude. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy, I’ve always responded to that notion.”

 

Under The Bright Lights was a dark crime story revolving around the exploits of the Shade family, a rambunctious crew whose members include both criminals and police: “I had an idea to do with cops and criminals: how they’ve often known each other since grade school, St Charles was that way. One of the top detectives there came from one of the most notorious criminal families. Once when I was a kid we were shopping and – well, somebody had taken a shot at one of this detective’s brothers, while he was engaged in criminal activity but so what! – and there on the steps of the police station, in broad daylight, was the detective who had caught this guy, and he was now hitting him with his pistol. My mom pulled me along and I was going ‘How could that happen? They’re not supposed to do that.’ So I had the idea of cop whose family and class entanglements sometimes made him less of a traditional cop.”

 

Rather than set the novel in St Charles itself, however, Woodrell took elements of the place and used them as the basis for the wholly fictional Louisiana town of St Bruno: “St Charles is a river town, Missouri river town. It was originally French and the north end was known as Frogtown. And I knew about some of the other French towns up and down the Mississippi, so I took all this in and invented my mythical town that sort of floated up and down the Mississippi between New Orleans and Cape Giradeau. It kind of moved if I needed it to move – so I made up my mythical town and had fun with it.”

 

Having written the novel, Woodrell took a while to find an agent, and the agent took a while to find a publisher. Meanwhile Dan and Katie were struggling to get by:  “It didn’t look like the book would sell, to the point that I’d almost forgotten about it,” he recalls.  “And we moved a lot without leaving a forwarding address, to get the bill collectors off our tail. So we did two or three of those moves and managed to lose the agent. He eventually found me in Arkansas, living in the delta.  I got a telegram saying ‘you need to call me’. He’d sold the book months before.”

 

In fact the agent had negotiated a two book deal, with Dan due to deliver a sequel in true detective novel fashion, Dan, however, hadn’t yet grasped the expectations of publishers and was already hard at work turning his short story Woe To Live On into a novel.

 

Set right here in the Ozarks, and loosely based on the activities of Quantrill’s raiders during the Civil War, Woe To Live On is a vivid and deliberately -  but never gratuitously - shocking account of the random madness of war. And for all its historical setting it’s no less personal a book than his contemporary work: “All sides of my family were here in the Ozarks at the time of the war. This town was burnt down two or three times by both sides. That’s how I got interested in the border wars. And, having grown up in the Vietnam era, I wanted to write about why and how Americans go to war.  And I came to the conclusion the politics of it aren’t worth a damn. For instance I was researching this black guy who fought for the Confederates, who was friends with a fellow called George Todd.  He went to fight with Todd because he was his friend. Which was about the same way I enlisted in the marines during the Vietnam war.”

 

It was a major step forward from the thoroughly enjoyable but comparatively lightweight Under The Bright Lights. Commercially though, it struck out at the time, much to Dan’s dismay: “Having published Under The Bright Lights first, it never occurred to me you couldn’t do a book of short stories next, then a novel then another gangster book. Well, turns out you can’t. Woe To Live On was very lightly supported when it was published here. The reviews said ‘mystery writer writes cowboy book. Woodrell  best get back to his hard trade of writing crime novels.’”

 

Beers and burgers finished, it’s time to move on out of TJ’s Hickory House. We head back to West Plains, stop off at the chichi new deli and wine store to buy classy Californian cabernets to go with dinner and then head back to the house, where Dan puts some James McMurtry on the sound system and we get back to the interview.

 

Following the commercial failure of Woe To Live On, Woodrell did indeed get back to writing crime novels. Starting with the promised sequel to Under The Bright Lights, Muscle For The Wing.

 

“It was a two book deal, but I was in the middle of Woe To Live On then and I didn’t want to drop it. So I finished Woe To Live On, and then I had to write a second Shade novel to fulfill the first contract.”

 

‘I enjoyed writing it’ says Woodrell now, but there’s no sign of great lasting enthusiasm for the project and, in truth, it’s the most forgettable of his novels. Nor did it bring any great commercial reward. The trouble was, having written two crime novels with the same characters, as far as the publishing world was concerned Woodrell was now a confirmed genre man. And he felt he had no option but to carry on digging himself deeper into the role. So he geared himself up to write a third Shade novel:

 

“I was broke. We were in Arkansas; no jobs, no prospects, we had $65 or something left. I went to a payphone and called my editor and pitched a story. I needed a deal and I needed it Tuesday. And I sold it over the phone, basically. Which did not put me in a very strong negotiating position. But I got something and I wrote The Ones You Do. By then I was getting a little further from the path I wanted to be on but… life’s life. And for me it  put an end to the trilogy, which really didn’t leave room for any more.”

 

It didn’t, to be honest, exactly leave the crime fiction buying audience baying for more either. The Ones You Do is an odd, rambling, existential kind of a crime story, with absolutely none of the slick plotting or high concept mcguffins that were starting to spell commercial success for contemporaries like Robert Crais or Michael Connolly. “People didn’t know what to make of it,” says Woodrell now.

 

When The Ones You Do flopped commercially it left Woodrell in a bad place, both financially and mentally: “I kind of fell into a pit for a few years there. I didn’t want to write. All four books had disappeared without a ripple. I just fell into a hole. Leave it kind of vague. I guess some of it was chemical, some of it spiritual. I just didn’t want to write for the first time ever. I’d done it for ten years for nothing. It’s pretty hard when you’re writing like that for peanuts. You kind of have to make your peace with what you see happening to others, with work you didn’t even consider very good.  We lived in Arkansas, then Cleveland, then here, then we went to San Francisco for a couple of years.”

 

It was in San Francisco that things began to turn around. Woodrell started a new book, Give Us A Kiss, and he began with what he knew. The hero, Doyle Redmond, is a failed novelist who heads back to the Ozarks one step ahead of the bailiffs, and soon gets involved with blood feuds between local drug dealers. It’s a bitter, oddly lyrical novel which brings the Ozarks to vivid life.

 

“I wrote Give US A Kiss on Nob Hill in San Francisco,” Woodrell tells me. ‘I’d got far away to a totally different world, and I was out there long enough to see the Ozarks from a different vantage point. Give Us A Kiss was fun and high-spirited, if a little bitter in places, and it was coming right at you. That was what I needed to bring me back into writing.

 

“But we were almost down to out last couple of bucks out there. We were going to have to get square jobs, a fate which I just couldn’t accept at this stage of life. I’ve never really had one. I’ve never worked steadily for anybody, never held a job for more than six months. I did all kinds of things: tar roofing, loading trucks and all that, but nothing I thought I would be stuck with. I didn’t want to try and get a teaching gig - even if I was able to.’

 

But while the novel saw Doyle Redmond trapped in a self-destructive nosedive, it, ironically enough, succeeded in rejuvenating its author’s career. He found a new agent who loved the book and his long time publishers, Henry Holt, accepted it gladly, offering a considerably bigger advance than he’d had before. Enough money in fact to give Dan and Katie some kind of security – at Ozark property prices if not San Francisco ones: “It was enough to get this house, so Katie just flew home and I said find us a place with what you got and she was walking around and this house was empty, they’d just hammered in the for sale sign, and we got it for a peanut and we’ve been here ever since.”

 

The publishers called Give Us A Kiss ‘a country noir’ which was petty apt. Annie Proulx, quite out of the blue, gave it a rave of a blurb – ‘Woodrell… celebrates blood kin, home country, and hot sex in this rich, funky, head-shakingly original novel. Woodrell is a ladystinger of a writer.’ Which didn’t hurt. Give us A Kiss may still have been ignored by the mainstream crime audience, but all of a sudden he was a cult writer rather than simply an obscure one.

 

 

Good though Give Us A Kiss was, his next book, Tomato Red, was even better; a wonderfully funny and tragic tale of blighted white trash dreams, a country noir every bit as sharp and twisted as the best of Jim Thompson or Charles Williams. There’s none of the self-referential spot-the author stuff here, just a beautifully wrought tale of the ordinary disasters that befall people who start life on the wrong end of a raw deal. The story of a failed petty criminal called Sammy Barlach, it grips from the very first line – ‘You’re no angel, you know how this stuff comes to happen’ – and never lets go. New in town, Sammy takes a little too much crank with some lowlifes out by the trailer park and ends us passing out in the mansion he’s just broken into. When he wakes up he’s in the company of West Plains’ two most dissatisfied citizens, Jason and Jamalee Merridew, the outcast children of the town whore, lifetime residents of the towns’ worst neigbourhood, the place they call Venus Holler.

 

Woodrell tells me where the characters began for him: ‘Couple of things fed into that,’ he says. ‘ There was a girl whose boyfriend tried to run her down with her own car right out in front of our house. By the time the cops got here he’d run off through the woods. She was all shaky and scared and I was out trying to help her but by the time the police got there she was mad at me for still standing there. She was just a little kid, but she was going ‘why don’t you take a fuckin’ picture, man?’ Well, I thought, what a tough little kid.

 

“Then there was a woman living in this house down by our garden. She was an ex hooker, not supposed to be doing it any more, but I noticed a lot of guys going over there. Turned out she was selling crank. And she had a daughter who was about 13 and she tried to have a little style. At the time, believe it or not, we had the main phone around here; a lot of people would come and use the phone. So this girl would come over and she seemed like a smart decent kid, considering the circumstances, but I thought it won’t be long… And that started me thinking and led to Jamalee and then to Tomato Red.”

 

Now, for long years it’s been a truism to say that the great unmentioned gulf in American life is that based of race. But beyond even race, the one real unmentionable is class - America clings hard to its egalitarian dream. And Tomato Red is all about class. It's about being born to the pure redneck/hillbilly/white trash/trailer park existence that qualifies you in American life only to appear on the Jerry Springer Show.

 

“There are people so alienated from the mainstream of American culture,” says Woodrell, “that it’s like a parallel universe. They don’t expect anything but trouble from the square world. Every time you interact with that world they want to give you a ticket, send you to jail, draft you. It’s never good. So they live by a separate value system. I’ve felt that way myself, when I got to graduate school in Iowa, I didn’t get it.  People would say things, and where I was from you’d smack them: where they’re from you’re supposed to come back with a witty rejoinder.”

 

Sammy Barlach is resigned to his fate and so is Bev the hooker. They’ve been around some, they know how it goes, which end of the stick you can expect to get. But the nineteen year old redhead Jamalee and her beautiful gay seventeen year old brother Jason, believe there’s got to be something more. So Jason works in the hair salon where the girls all swoon over him, while Jamalee read etiquette books and watches movies to plan their better life together. Now and then they break into rich folks houses so they can accustom themselves to the better life. That’s how they happen to run into Sammy and everything starts to fall apart.

 

From its farcical beginning to the awful stupid tragedy that is its denouement, this is a flat out marvelous book. Rooted in the purest fifties noir tradition, this is nevertheless the purest of literary fictions. Like a murder ballad or a prison yard blues. Tomato Red is written in the kind of vernacular poetry you want to read and re-read to learn by heart.

 

One major difference between Give us A Kiss and Tomato Red is that while the former was written from the point of view of the outsider, or rather of the prodigal son returning after a long absence, and allows the place to be seen through the eyes of a writer, Tomato Red is much more a view from the inside. For while the main protagonist, Sammy Barlach comes from out of town , the place he comes from is not much different. It’s a world he knows all too well. With the third of his Ozark novels, though, Woodrell went all the way inside.

 

The Death Of Sweet Mister is entirely held within the world of West Plains (or West Table as Woodrell calls it in his books), and its narrator is a twelve year old boy.

“I was actually reluctant to do it,”’ says Woodrell. “Kid narrators can be a little cutesy. He wasn’t. I started getting a sense of him and his mother. The idea of being inside a personality, a culture or a family that’s considered being transgressive is almost comfortable to me, I don’t have to make a big leap. For some reason I can put myself in there pretty deeply.”

 

There’s one obvious precedent for all American novels with twelve year old boys at their centre, it’s the work of Mark Twain, a novelist whose influence is so big that’s it’s easy to take it for granted: “Definitely there’s an influence of Twain,” agrees Woodrell, “I forget to even mention it some times it seems so blatant to me. Every summer my mother insisted I read more Twain. Some of them, like Tom Sawyer, I read every summer, we’d make a little raft and float around on it.”

 

The childhood depicted in the Death Of Sweet Mister is a long way less than idyllic. To call the twelve years old Shug’s relationship with his alcoholic mother dysfunctional wouldn’t be the half of it. Again, though, there’s this constant tension between the actual beauty of the language and the quotidian darkness of the lives he writes about. A Mark Twain for the Jerry Springer age? Why not?

 

“To me that book is where I finally became a novelist on the path I wanted to be on, Tomato Red opened the door, and Sweet Mister, that’s my favourite one, along with the one I’ve just completed, I’m not as rambunctious any more. It’s still got crime elements in it though, so you can embrace it on that level if you want to.”

 

The new book, imminent as we speak, has been some five years in the writing. It’s called Winter’s Bone: “It’s about a family called the Dollys who are mentioned in Give Us A Kiss,” Woodrell tells me, “they’re an extended criminal clan and the main character, Ree, is a sixteen year old girl whose father is out on bail. He disappears and he’d put their house up as his bond. She’s got two little bothers and a mentally ill mother. She’s got to save their house and then she can get out of there. It’s about her quest to save her father. But it’s not that simple, as she’s also got to deal with being a sixteen year old girl.’”

 

It’s also, as I’ve mentioned already, somewhat more than good. It’s a dense short book made up of sentence after sentence of remarkable richness, a book that bares the hallmarks of having been crafted expertly over an extended period of time. That Woodrell has been able to spend a goodly length of time writing this book, and the one before it, is not so much because he’s suddenly a bestseller, but because, seven or so years back, Woodrell’s luck finally turned.

 

His least successful novel of all, Woe To Live On, was picked up by Ang Lee and turned into a film entitled Ride with the Devil. It’s not, it has to be said, Ang Lee’s most highly regarded effort, being notably slow to get going, but Woodrell’s understandably not about to bad mouth it:

 

“I’ll never be unhappy about that experience because it was their payments that allowed me to experiment, to take my work in the way I wanted it to go. They took the wolf away from the door for a good three years. Which was not a position I’d ever been in before. Y’know they made a movie. I wrote a book. For the most part I’m pretty happy with the movie, a lot of the dialogue comes straight from the book so you got to see that. Not everyone likes the way the dialogue was utilised, but I did.”

 

Of course, this being Dan Woodrell’s life, all did not go perfectly. The studio seemed reluctant to really get behind the film: “It never got any kind of chance. Ang Lee continues to speak highly of it. Jeffrey Wright says it was his favourite part ever. I guess it was too confusing for people, the sensibility of it. My main tick with the movie is it starts a little slowly cause they put in an opening scene to explain what was happening.”

 

But, as he points out, hit film or not, it gave him the time to emerge as the writer he always promised to be. I wondered if his steadily increasing literary standing made him think of getting out of the Ozarks, and moving to somewhere where it would be easier to bask in the warm glow of literary approbation:

 

‘I don’t think I need to move.’ he says, after a significant pause which suggests he has at least entertained the idea, “I think there are things about this place I wouldn’t know if I didn’t live here. But there’s also a point at which you’re not filling the reservoir with enough other things… It’s a pretty limited way of life here. Very removed from the way the rest of the country looks. No literary scene or anything like that, though with Amazon and Netflix…. And I do like having my privacy so…”

 

He pauses again, then brightens and carries on, “And I do have a relationship with this area. I don’t want to live on the Upper West Side or something. There is something here for me… I’m just one generation from illiteracy, my grandmother was illiterate on one side of the family. Though oddly enough my grandmother on the other side was a bookworm, so go figure.  In a way the problem with such regions as this is that everyone who can leave leaves. It’s not that I’m here on a mission to get young people to become writers, but I do think people knowing that there’s a guy in town who’s had a movie made from his book, and didn’t leave, helps. Plus the longer I’m here, the more I can see that could be done with it as a writer.”

 

There’s a pervasive notion in literary circles that for a writer to shun cafe society and base himself in somewhere remote and working class must be a kind of affectation, And it’s certainly the case that those writers, myself included, who live away from the literary hotspots tend to suspect that the dice are loaded against us, that metropolitan insiders are scooping all the big deals with their fey tales of medialand life. It’s a paranoia that Woodrell freely admits to suffering from in spades. I wondered if he thought there was a danger in becoming a professional outsider.

 

Woodrell weighs the question and comes up with  this: “I went through therapy at one point during the dark gap there. And a lot came out about my class resentments and so forth. When I was a little kid I was accelerated, jumped grades, they wanted me to represent the  school in spelling bees and all that, but I was also from a certain kind of background that I recognised wasn’t an exalted one. The therapist’s notion was that I was still this little kid saying ‘I can do anything, let me have a shot and I can win.’”

 

And then he suddenly leaves the well-trodden matter of class resentments and the degree to which they’re justified, and starts talking about his childhood again. Up to now when he’s spoken about it it’s always been in terms of his bad boy attitude, but now he reveals a different side:

 

“I get a lot of my friendships and kinships out of books,” he says, by way of a preamble, “I’ve always been that way, I was born sick and I was bed bound quite often. I couldn’t eat or hold food down properly till I was operated on when I was 11 or 12, so I spent a lot of my time reading. I was supposed to die two or three times. My intestines were knotted and they couldn’t tell what the ailment was for a long time. I had pneumonia three times. The intestinal problem got so bad that at one point they reckoned they had 24 hours before I was going to die. So they actually split me all down my stomach for exploratory surgery and they found my appendix had knotted round the liver, and it was way up where it wasn’t supposed to be, and it had corrupted and was rotting into the liver.  They had to cut all my stomach muscles to get in there, so it was over a year before I was able to run again. It was good for my reading. I got into Robert Louis Stevenson. Things like that you hear so often with writers.”

 

And its perhaps this instinctive understanding of vulnerability  that these years bred into the bone, at least as much as his class empathy with the underdog, that makes Daniel Woodrell not just a regional writer or as blue collar writer or whatever, but one whose subject, like all great writers, is simply the human condition.