Hobnob Landing, a town of 3,000-odd people "nestled where the Mississippi doubled back on itself like a black racer fixing to bite its tail", is about to go under water: it's 1927, the river is bursting its banks after months of rain, and the levee, a giant wall of earth 30ft high, is about to break. Into this desperate, drenched town – as a setting for a thriller it is hard to beat – come two prohibition agents, "mysterious, ruthless, unbribable", on the trail of their mysteriously vanished predecessors and of the local still.
Just like his Gold Dagger award-winning tale of a murder, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, Tom Franklin's new thriller The Tilted World, written with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, immerses its readers in America's deep south. It's a thriller for those who like their fiction literary, or literary fiction for those who like their thrills.
The wonderfully named Dixie Clay is lonely, unhappily married and mourning the loss of her baby son to scarlet fever. She's also a bootlegger, making the best moonshine in miles, so when her path crosses that of prohibition agents Ingersoll and Ham, the unlikely wards of an orphaned baby, sparks are set to fly.
There are thrills and nail-biting aplenty in The Tilted World, as Dixie Clay finds herself spiralling deeper into danger, and as the Mississippi lunges for the top of the levee where the sandbaggers struggle to contain it. But from the chilly descriptions of the rain that drip from its pages – "pewter skewers hitting the men full in the face… endless marbles endlessly dropped", to its effortless recreation of prohibition-era America – The Tilted World is a thriller to savour, not to rush through.
Franklin and Fennelly's characters are each beautifully, fully realised, from Dixie Clay in all her tough isolation and her longing for a child – Franklin wrote loneliness well in Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter too – to Ingersoll, the blues-playing orphan. The threat of the rising Mississippi – "the whole town was looking as the river absorbed its channels, swelling and fattening, covering the batture, then filling the barrow pit, then climbing the levee foot by foot. Now it sloshed and surged at the top where the sandbaggers raced against it" – is fabulously ominous, the villains of the piece also suitably disturbing.
Franklin comes garlanded with praise from the likes of Philip Roth and Dennis Lehane. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was eminently worthy of its best crime novel of the year gong back in 2011, and teaming up with the prize-winning Fennelly for The Tilted World has created another novel whose presence stays long after it is put aside. This is a drowning world of "murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, dynamite and deluge" Franklin and Fennelly have given us and, as autumn draws in and the rain keeps falling, it's one to dive into with gleeful foreboding.
