Alan Ackmann

Poachers

By Tom Franklin

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I learned a lot at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. One thing I learned, for example, is that apparently everyone—at some point in their writing career—will meet and like Tom Franklin. Whether they interviewed him for an article, heard him at a conference, or met him as a visiting writer, the guy’s name just kept coming up, and always in glowing terms. It makes sense, though. A friend of mine once described Tommy as “more willing to hug another man than anyone I’ve ever met.” That’s high praise for an author whose first novel, Hell at the Breech, was turned down as a movie option by no less than Clint Eastwood on the grounds of it being too violent. And when Dirty Harry thinks you’re toeing the line, you know you’ve accomplished . . . well . . . something, at least.

And if you enjoyed Hell at the Breech (which for the record is quite good), you might also enjoy Franklin’s debut collection Poachers, which I believe was named by Esquire as one of the best books of the year when it came out in 1999. It hits some false notes, but it is quite engaging to see the defining traits of Hell at the Breech (fascination with the South; emphasis on plotting; clarity of scene), emerging from Franklin’s early writing in vestigial form. During a guest lecture at Arkansas Tommy once mentioned that when he started writing he struggled with plotting, producing stories that were elegant and sometimes moving, but essentially inert portraits with little narrative engine. I suspect that some of those early stories—“Shubuta”, “Blue Horses, and “Instinct”, perhaps—made their way into Poachers. During this same visit, though, Tommy also mentioned that as a consequence of these early struggles he now has an occasional over-reliance on plotting at the expense of other elements. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but there is a distinct contrast between stories like “Shubuta” and stories like “Grit”, where the narrative tension is palpable. The centerpiece of the collection, though, is the novella “Poachers”, which reads a bit like Hell at the Breech with training wheels. You can see the first signs of Southern culture mixing with noir/western mythos (think of a drawling Raymond Chandler narrator wading through a swamp) as well as the fascination with anti-heroes and physical detail. Poachers is more than an exercise in literary anthropology, however. It is a fine, cohesive collection, and worth reading if it crosses your path.

Incidentally, Tommy once said that—for reasons unknown to me—it was a personal ambition of his to kill at least one armadillo in every book he writes. Well the curious might be interested to know that in this goal—as well as many others—he succeeds with Poachers.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Aug 7, 10:28 AM.
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