Interviews
Q&A with Tom Franklin
Author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Q: Tell us a bit about your latest book Crooked Letter, Crooked
Letter. How did you come up with the title?
A: Title's a pneumonic device used to teach children (mostly southern
children) how to spell Mississippi. M, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I,
crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, humpback, humback, I.
Q: Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a bit of a departure from your previous two novels—
Smonk and Hell at the Breech—in that it is set in contemporary times and the story line is a
bit less dark. What inspired the premise for this novel and the departure from a more
historical setting?
A: I'd been wanting to write about a small town police officer, and I'd long had the image of a loner
mechanic in my mind. When I put the two together, the story began to form. I used a lot of
autobiographical stuff for Larry, the mechanic.
Q: A review in USA Today (for Hell at Breech) stated that “He also makes his characters
rise up from the pages as if they were there with you.” …and this is certainly true in your
latest novel. How do you approach the task of developing your characters and bringing
them to life? Are the characters in Crooked Letter based on anyone in particular?
A: They're both a combination of different facets of different people, a conglomeration of fact and
fiction. I usually try to just let them begin to do what they want to do, just put them in a situation
and see what they do. When they begin to surprise me, do things I hadn't anticipated, that's when
it's working.
But 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. This guy was actually the law in a nearby mill town, and my
hamlet of Dickinson fell in his tiny jurisdiction. I've always loved the idea of small town cops,
especially one who might be a kind of underdog to the police forces of nearby larger towns.
Q: In Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter your two main characters are anything but
stereotypical, the young black boy goes off to college to play baseball and comes back to be
the town constable and the young white boy is the accused murderer and the town outcast.
What, if anything, prompted you to portray these characters this way?
A: No real person is a stereotype, and I try to make my characters as real as I can. We're all a mess
of contradictions and secrets, strangenesses and desires, and nobody's all good or all bad. We're all
somewhere in the spectrum between absolute good and absolute evil. So I just try to find a
character who's fairly normal, and put him or her in a fix and see how he or she negotiates it to see,
as Kurt Vonnegut says, what he or she is made of.
In this case, the story as I came to understand it called for Larry to stay home and Silas to leave. If it
had been the other way around, I'd still work to make the characters unstereotypical.
Q: Without giving away too much of the story, what is one thing (emotion, thought) that
readers can expect to walk away with after reading this book?
A: It's a sad book, but it's full of hope. Hope is what I want a reader to leave with.
Q: Historically the South has not always had a positive image in other parts of the country.
How has your experience growing up and living in the rural South shaped your talent as a
writer? And have you ever felt the need to justify or redeem the South’s past in any of your
works?
A: I think growing up in the south made me the person I am, and the writer I am comes from that.
So, yes, the south's 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 that's an interesting
combination, a deep well for stories.
Q: Did you always know that you wanted to be a writer? Who are some writers, past and
present, that you admire or have inspired you?
I always knew I wanted to tell stories, one way or another. If I'd had a video camera in the mid
1970s I'm sure I'd be a filmmaker now. But I just had a portable typewriter, and so the stories I
could tell were ones on paper.
Q: You are one of the most celebrated writers in the field, and have been compared to the
likes of Harper Lee, William Faulkner, and Elmore Leonard. What do you believe is the one
thing that sets you apart from other contemporary writers in your genre?
A: What sets me apart? I honestly don't know that I’m more "apart" from other writers of my
generation. Landscape plays a large role in what I write, but that's true of many other writers. My
stuff is set in the south, but that's true of others as well. I don't know, honestly.
Q: As a professor of English, what is one piece of advice that you would share with aspiring
writers?
A: Read, starting with the classics. Read all the time. If you don't read, you won't ever be a writer.
Also, write. This seems obvious, but it's amazing how many "writers" don't write very much.
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Reading Group Guide
Introduction
Tom Franklin’s extraordinary talent has been hailed by the leading lights of contemporary literature—Phillip Roth, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, and Dennis Lehane. Reviewers have called his fiction “ingenious” (USA Today) and “compulsively readable” (Memphis Commercial Appeal). His narrative power and flair for characterization have been compared to the likes of Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Elmore Leonard, and Cormac McCarthy. Now the Edgar Award-winning author returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas “32” Jones were boyhood pals, Larry the child of white,= lower middle-class parents and Silas the son of a poor, single black mother. Their worlds were as different as night and day, yet, for a few months, the boys stepped outside of their circumstance and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: on a date, Larry took a girl to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She
was never found and there was no confession, but all eyes rested on Larry. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. He and Larry’s friendship was broken, and then Silas left.
Over twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned to town as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed, again. And now, two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.
Questions for Discussion
1. The epigraph reveals the origins of the novel’s title. Why do you think Tom
Franklin chose to use “Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter”? What significance
does it hold for the story?
2. Describe the boys Larry and Silas were, and the men they became. What
drew Larry and Silas together as children? What separated them? How did
you feel about both characters?
3. What elements of Larry’s life set him apart from others? Could he have done
anything to change people’s opinion of him? Would you call Larry a “loser’?
What about Silas?
4. When Larry is shot at the beginning of the novel, he is sympathetic to his
attacker. “Larry felt forgiveness for him because all monsters were
misunderstood.” Does Larry consider himself to be a monster? Why? Why
isn’t he bitter? Could you be as charitable if you were in his place? Why does
he say all monsters are misunderstood? Do you think he feels the same way
at the end of the novel?
5. During the attack, the shooter is wearing an old monster mask that Larry
recognized. What did that mask symbolize for both the victim and his
attacker?
6. Tom Franklin goes back and forth between past and present to tell his story.
How are Larry and Silas prisoners of their childhoods? How can we break the
past’s hold on us?
7. Describe Larry’s relationship with his father, Carl. How might things have
been different if Larry knew the truth about his family sooner? Why did Carl
force Larry and Silas to fight as boys? What impact did that fight have on
their friendship? Do you think the outcome was Carl’s intent? How did Silas
feel about Carl?
8. Talk about both boys’ relationships to their mothers. How did their mothers
shape them? Were they good sons? What kind of people were their mothers?
Why does Silas go to see Larry’s mother in the nursing home?
9. When Silas visits Mrs. Ott, he’s reminded of the past when he first arrived in
the town with his mother, both of them coatless in the cold. “Sometimes he
thought how Larry’s mother had given them coats but not a ride in her car.
How what seemed liked kindness could be the opposite.” How was this
behavior cruel? Can you think of other examples from the book where
kindness and cruelty were combined?
10. Was Larry treated fairly by the community or the law? We’re supposed to be
a nation of laws in which people are innocent until proven guilty.
11. Why did Silas remain silent when he could have helped Larry when they
were teenagers? Why does he finally come forward with the truth? How
might both their lives have been different if the truth were known?
12. When he was a little boy, Larry’s mother used to pray for God to send him a
special friend, “one just for him.” Were her prayers answered?
13. After Silas, Larry considered Wallace Stringfellow to be his friend. What was
the bond between Larry and Wallace? What attracted one to the other? Were
they really friends? What is a friend?
14. As an adult, Larry also prayed to God. “Please forgive my sins, and send me
some business. Give Momma a good day tomorrow or take her if it’s time.
And help Wallace, God. Please.” What were Larry’s sins? Why did he pray for
Wallace? What did Larry see in Wallace?
15. When Larry is in the hospital after the shooting, Silas goes to visit. “He
wondered how broken Larry was by the events of his life, how damaged.”
How would you answer Silas?
16. Was Larry broken? Was he damaged? What kept him from becoming the
monster everyone believed he was? Silas, too, wonders about himself.
“What’s missing out of you Silas?” Does he discover his missing self? How? Is
Silas a better man for the knowledge? How does that insight affect Larry’s
life?
17. Larry felt he was to blame for Wallace’s tragic choices. Do you think he was
responsible at all? What about Silas? How much responsibility do we carry
for others? For family? Friends? Strangers? How much responsibility does
the community bear for the Wallace’s actions?
18. How does Larry react when Silas tells him the truth about their childhood?
Can true friends overcome betrayal? How? Do you think they will be part of
each other’s lives going forward?
19. Silas left Southern Mississippi then returned. Larry never left. Why did they
make the decisions they did? What was it about their small town that drew
and kept them there? How does place shape the novel? Could this have
happened in any small town?
20. How is racism a part of the story? Use Larry and Silas’s experiences to
support you response.
21. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is also a coming of age story. How did the
characters come into themselves as the story progressed? What possibilities
might the future hold for Larry and Silas?
22. At the novel’s end, Tom Franklin writes, “the land had a way of covering the
wrongs of people.” What does he mean by this?
23. What did you take away from reading Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter?
About the Author
Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk.
Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, he teaches in the University of
Mississippi’s MFA program and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the poet
Beth Ann Fennelly, and their children.