Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms

BY MICHELE HEWITSON

This is better than good, which is presumably why it won the 2001 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel. Set in the American Deep South during the Depression, The Bottoms is a delightfully old-fashioned piece of crime writing. If the modern crime novel is all DNA-testing, snappish female medical examiners with an agenda, and gruesome detail laid out in stainless steel mortuary slabs, The Bottoms reflects on how a crime can affect a close-knit community and how it can divide it.

Lansdale's prose is as languorous as the time it depicts: hens scratch in vegetable gardens, a yellow dog lies panting in the heat of a Texas summer, you can hear the creak of the rocking chairs on the porches. But there are water moccasins in the swimming hole and a bunch of good old boys who like to dress up in sheets and burn crosses.

And beneath the swing bridge over the Sabine River, young Harry Crane believes, is the Goat Man who is reputed to take animals and children and eat them .

Harry finds a corpse bound to a tree with barbed wire. He's sure the Goat Man is responsible. The white community is certain a black man is responsible. Harry's dad, the local cop and barber, fears an outbreak of race violence.

Part coming-of-age, part murder-mystery, The Bottoms is far and away at the top of this month's sampler.

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