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FINE DARK LINE, A
by Joe R. Lansdale
Warner Books, January 2003
304 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0892967293


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The fifties often seem to be the ŗgood old days,˛ the time when life was simple, when everyone believed that life was fair and good, when it seemed like the world would stay that way for ever. This is on the other side of the huge earthquake of the sixties, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and the protests, all the things which seem to have changed our world forever. And yet, the seeds to all this were developing in the fifties although many of us refused to take notice of them.

This is the story of a thirteen-year-old boy in the fifties, Stanley Mitchell, Jr., and his little dog Nub. His family had just moved to Deswmont, Texas, in 1958, and his father owned the drive-in theater. It was summer and it seemed to stretch out before him for ever, as summer do when you are young. One day he tripped over the corner of a metal box and discovered it was full of love letters from M to J and a journal. In the woods he found the remnants of a burned out house. He learned that Margaret Wood had been raped and murdered along the river and the same night, the house had burned down with Jewel Ellen Stilwind inside Determined to find the story behind these things, he found much much more than he had ever bargained for.

His fellow sleuths were an old black man, Buster, the projectionist at the drive-in and, to a lesser extent, his older sister, Callie, although she was more and more interested in boys. Then there was Richard, the abused and neglected child of a nešer-do-well family nearby. Together they found hints and bits of the story and eventually learned what they believed to be the truth.

The relations between blacks and whites in the South is clearly portrayed. Most white people were taught the blacks were inferior and carelessly treated them that way. Most blacks were privately contemptuous of whites. The relationship between Buster and Stanley was unique and in the process he found that Buster was a far different man than he had assumed. Justice was different for blacks and whites, just as there were separate facilities for blacks.

This was a archetypal small Texas town. Everyone knew everyone else. There was a caste system and everyone accepted his place in it. On the surface everything was normal, people obeyed the law and were kind to one another, men did not curse around women, children were always good. Superficially it did seem idyllic. But beneath the surface all sorts of things festered. As Stanley says,

Probably all towns were like this and most people never found out. I wished I were most people. It was like once the lid was off the world, everything that was ugly and secret came out.

In this one summer Stanley learned way too much about the world.

The characters are well-developed. Stanley is the essence of a young boy, free and innocent until the world starts impinging on him. The other characters are authentic as well, none of them stereotypical, none of them predictable. The story engulfs the reader and moves inexorably on as the reader gets more and more involved in the lives of these people. Probably few thirteen-year-old boys had to face what Stanley did, but none of it is impossible and all of it shows how events will change and help people grow. There is a line across which the adult world hovers and eventually we all have to cross that line and learn about the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, January 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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