The Bottoms by Joe R. Lansdale

The most common type of mystery novel centers around a detective, either professional or amateur, who cleverly deduces the solution by uncovering a variety of clues and by having a knowledge of human nature. This is an uncommon mystery: Its detective is a 12-year-old boy who just happens upon many clues but has no idea how to interpret them and certainly no understanding about the kind of human who would commit the crimes. The novel actually has a great deal of similarity to Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird, including the facts that it is Southern (in this case, deep East Texas in the 1930s), highlights racial tensions between blacks and whites, features a young main character in a coming-of-age story, and stresses family bonds.

Harry Collins and his younger sister are lost in the bottom-land along the Sabine River when they make a gruesome discovery--the naked dead body of a black woman, mutilated and bound to a tree with barbed wire. Their father, who is the local constable, does his best to investigate, but he meets with indifference in the white community, because the victim is black, and with a lack of trust in the black community, because he is white. With a complete lack of cooperation and of investigative training, he can find no solution to the identity of the murderer. As for Harry and his sister, they are convinced the crime was committed by the Goat Man, a perhaps-mythical creature they believe they glimpsed on the night of the discovery of the body.

Because this is a mystery, it would be criminal of me to divulge more of the plot. Suffice it to say, more bodies turn up and some really bad things happen before the solution is revealed.

It's the unflinching accuracy in recording a specific time and place which makes this mystery better than the ordinary. The almost universal acceptance of racial bigotry is portrayed, including the fact that the Ku Klux Klan was composed of well-meaning people, along with the sadistic bullies. The narrative voice, that of an old man in a nursing home telling a story of his youth, is absolutely spot-on perfect, folksy and in the local vernacular, but not a caricature in any way. The location is pictured with loving detail, evoking a landscape which has now almost disappeared under concrete and asphalt but which is still recognizable.

I read this book because I am always searching for Texas books to review for TexasLive magazine, and I did not expect to like it nearly as much as I did. If I had never read To Kill a Mockingbird I would have liked it even more. Lansdale did borrow substantially from that plot, making the solution to the mystery fairly easy to figure out. It's the writing, though, which makes this a good read. This won the Edgar Award, the primary mystery book prize. It was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2001.