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Tag Archives: Oklahoma

Dust Bowl Mystery: Funeral Train

08 Monday May 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1935, book review, drabness, Dust Bowl, full characters, Great Depression, historical fiction, Laurie Loewenstein, law enforcement, mystery, Oklahoma, racism, railroads, sabotage, scams, vivid detail

Review: Funeral Train, by Laurie Loewenstein
Akashic, 2022. 263 pp. $38

One evening in 1935, a passenger train derails near Vermilion, a small town in the Oklahoma panhandle. The wreck causes fearsome damage and fills the hospital with the wounded and dying. Sheriff Temple Jennings is overwhelmed, not just with the enormity of the tragedy but its personal nature for him: his beloved wife, Etha, was on that train, and he panics when he can’t find her among the survivors.

Luckily, he soon retrieves his bearings, for the derailment may have been no accident, and there are many threads to follow before he can penetrate the mystery. Meanwhile, his young deputy, Ed McCance, locates Etha and sees her to an ambulance, but the sheriff can’t stop worrying about her. That anxiety doubles when the doctor insists that she stay flat on her back, something she’s never done—and for Christmas, a few days away, her niece and her drunk, deadbeat husband are coming to visit. Etha would move heaven and earth for them.

Law enforcement in those parts usually involves dealing with moonshiners. The federal government may have repealed Prohibition, but local law forbids any alcoholic drink stronger than beer, and beer’s enough to bring about drunk and disorderly behavior.

Also, scarcity arising from the depression and Dust Bowl has influenced certain citizens who might have been law-abiding to stray from the straight and narrow. Scams and dodges come to light all the time. And then there’s Gwendolyn, a heifer who wanders in the roadway, causing trouble for motorists, because her owner can’t manage to keep his fences repaired.

Naturally, these concerns fall away once the derailment happens. And the next night, a woman is murdered while walking her dog in her backyard. Since she lived near the tracks, is her death connected to the railroad sabotage—if that’s what occurred—or a separate crime?

A chief pleasure of Funeral Train is how Loewenstein portrays a Dust Bowl town and its denizens. You can practically feel the grit between your fingers, taste the desperation, the search for sweet or pleasant moments amid the dreariness, the thin margins of just getting by. The author shows the tavern, the hospital, the soda fountain run by the local go-getter, the chicken farmer ornery because he’s deep in debt and his wife has run off with the kids.

Also, the lawmen have edges and corners, something not every mystery writer bothers with. Temple’s deputy, McCance, was apparently down and out a year before the novel begins, but the sheriff has taken a chance on him. Ed’s trying hard to learn all he can, make a better life for himself and his young bride. You see both lawmen make mistakes and sweat from unexpected danger, not at all sure they’ll make it. I like that too–and the subplot of the visiting niece feels real.

Loewenstein also pays attention to Jim Crow. The Black passengers on the train suffered the worst of the accident, because their segregated car, made of wood rather than metal and in terrible shape, was hooked up right behind the locomotive. In the crash, the car collapsed like a concertina, and the people trapped within got flooded with scalding water from the boiler. The railroad—the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, or AT&SF—shows complete indifference to them.

Among the characters flowing through the novel is Claude Steele, the detective the railroad sends. Temple meets him when he arrives at the station:

Most of the AT&SF policemen that Temple ran into over the years were ex-cops who continued to dress the part: spit-and shine uniforms, brass buttons, epaulets, and visored caps bearing shields. None of the travelers matched that look. A stranger who did approach him, hand out, was outfitted in a bulky topcoat, woolen suit jacket, and greasy vest. Sagging gray trousers overflowed a pair of unbuckled rubber boots—their clasps flapping with each step. Temple swallowed his surprise.

He’s quite a character, Claude, obsessed with railroads. His hobby is collecting railroad spikes, which come in different designs, though that’s changing in the march toward standardization, which he mourns. No one can escape hearing about the various kinds, including the fortyish woman working in the boardinghouse where he rooms, who actually seems interested. As you might guess, Claude’s also enamored of his detective skills, and since Temple, Ed, and he must team up, that affects the story.

This spanking new 1935 prototype of an AT&SF diesel locomotive, not introduced until the following year (courtesy Acme News Service, published by Mexia Weekly Herald, via Wikimedia Commons. Copyright not renewed; public domain)

By now, it’s probably obvious that where some mystery writers toss in historical details and atmosphere almost as an afterthought, Loewenstein focuses on them. Though that gives Funeral Train a rare sense of time and place, I thought one aspect of the mystery a little too cut-and-dried. But it’s a gripping story whose rough edges feel real, depicting people no better than they should be. I recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Struggle for Redemption: I Will Send Rain

13 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, biblical plagues, book review, coming-of-age story, Dust Bowl, Grapes of Wrath, historical fiction, individuality, John Steinbeck, literary fiction, Oklahoma, Rae Meadows, redemption

Review: I Will Send Rain, by Rae Meadows
Holt, 2016. 253 pp. $26

It’s 1934 in Mulehead, Oklahoma, and the Bell family, having watched their crops and their neighbors’ wither and die in perennial drought, now face another, undreamed-of terror: the dust that destroys whatever the heat and grasshoppers have missed. As other families give up and head to California, the Bells stay put; it’s as if Meadows has reimagined The Grapes of Wrath, depicting a family born to suffer. Samuel, the good-hearted but rigid-thinking father and husband, believes that God is punishing them, and as he loses himself in religion, his wife, Annie, drifts away. Trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, she dreams of a different life, a different man, anything to escape the crushing, gray sameness.

A farmer and his two sons brave a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936; Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

A farmer and his two sons brave a dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936; Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Her children are what tether her to Mulehead and Samuel. They have Fred, a bright, exuberant eight-year-old who can’t speak but communicates by writing notes and with gestures. Like many children, he sees more than he understands or can express (and Meadows uses him expertly as a catalyst to derive tension from secrets kept or revealed). Fred’s older sister, Barbara Ann, known as Birdie, is almost sixteen, and she takes after her still-attractive mother in her looks and urge to break free. Headstrong and sensual, Birdie convinces herself that she’s in love with Cy, the boy next door. But she also wants to live and can’t wait for the future, a state of mind that Meadows describes perfectly:

Life was mostly about remembering or waiting, Birdie thought. Remembering when things were better, waiting for things to get better again. There was never a now, never a time when you said, ‘This is it.’ You thought there would be that time–when you turned sixteen, when Cy finally kissed you, when school got out–but then you ended up waiting for something else.

Take Birdie’s desires for freedom and experience, throw in a callow boy, and you can guess what will happen to her, even if you don’t read the jacket flap and its ominous, obvious hint. Likewise, since Fred has asthma, for which there’s no known cure or treatment–even if the Bells had the money to pay–you have to wonder what havoc the dust storms will wreak on the poor lad. And as if that weren’t portent enough, Annie has already lost one child, who lived a week after birth. Not a day passes that she doesn’t feel the pain.

I feel two ways about the overly predictable, heartbreaking story. First and foremost, I admire I Will Send Rain for its fierce honesty. The Dust Bowl was a tragedy, and Meadows refuses to make nice with it, which means that nobody escapes. The characters have to struggle just like anyone else and can’t expect a benevolent authorial hand to bail them out. The writing, though spare, packs a wallop, and the author uses her skilled economy to convey a remarkable depth and breadth of one family’s experience, capturing the universal in the specific. Beautifully done.

However, once the sequence of tragedies grabs you by the throat, what then? Since they’re predictable, the only question is how the Bells will deal with them, and here, Meadows has a difficult choice. Does she keep the pressure on, showing no more quarter than Nature, or does she relent? If she keeps the pressure on, does the book become too painful to read and ultimately unsatisfying? But if she relents in hopes of letting her characters find redemption, does that compromise the fierce honesty that put them in trouble in the first place?

I think Meadows wants it both ways, but read the book to see whether you agree. Specifically, I find the resolution illogical, given that Samuel’s a Bible-thumper and Annie’s a minister’s daughter. After all, Samuel takes it into his head that God is testing him, as with Noah, and that he must build an ark. As a literary conceit, that one’s dubious, but it also suggests that Samuel’s morality has been fired in an ancient kiln and is therefore unlikely to bend. Then again, I understand Samuel less than any other character; he seems to have little or no inner life, nor to want one. I do like how he tries to involve Fred in his projects and share small secrets, which makes him more human as a father. But the way the novel unfolds, I expect a confrontation or two that somehow don’t happen, and I think that’s a mistake.

All the same, I Will Send Rain has a lot going for it, and even its flaws are worth thinking about.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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