When I first moved to Austin, TX, from New York City. I
found the people friendlier on the face of it than those I’d left behind in
Manhattan, but also different. I’d been an editor sent to Texas by Harper &
Row (now HarperCollins) to do some rite-of-passage sales work. But it wasn’t
long before I called New York and told them, “I’m not coming back, y’all.” I
loved Texas and still live here. I started right away letting a little twang
and drawl show in my voice and I worked that into my writing as well.
It was that initial splash into the cold water of the
differences that turned me into something of an anthropologist, observing and
comparing the stark differences between the cultures, and later using that sort
of thrill of newness to color the settings of novels. I wanted to share that
early excitement with readers.
The setting of a book needs to support and help drive the
action and character development of a novel. With Texas the choice of backdrop
is vast, from the flat desert Southwest in the state, to the mountains of Big
Bend, to the tall piney woods of Eastern Texas ranging from Nacogdoches to
Houston, to the flat cotton fields of the panhandle, to the rolling, curvy hill
country near Austin where the novel To
Hell and Gone in Texas takes place. But it is the people who spice and
flavor any setting.
As a newbie to Texas, I drove around with my eyes open and
my jaw at times dropped. From the liberal pocket of Austin I had only to drive
in any direction in those days to start seeing pickup trucks with gun racks in
the back windows. The law said it was okay then to have an open container in a
vehicle and many considered it a right to have a beer in one hand while
driving.
Whole Foods then was a hippy-dippy communal grocery on South
Lamar where everyone wore tie-dyed shirts and I didn’t see a bra for the first
five years. How those times have changed! And the festivals were bold mixes of
people, like those who celebrated chili cook-offs. But no one dared to use
beans in a contest. In fact, that’s how you could insult someone. “I’ll bet
that low-life puts beans in his chili.” And, yes, it was “he,” since only men
could be the cooks in such contests.
At times it was hard to sort through what were normal
customs and what were not. On a trip to San Angelo once I stopped at a
convenience store in the middle of bumfart nowhere and a guy came out of the
store drinking from a can of cold gravy. Turns out, that was not normal. Though
warm biscuits and gravy is an everyday breakfast. Chicken-fried steaks were
ubiquitous as well. But at the Texas State Fair they were deep-frying Snickers
bars, cotton candy, and all manner of things, And folks, that’s just not right
no matter what state.
An aspect I grew to like was that, when driving on a country
two-lane road, the driver of an oncoming truck would wave, and I would wave
back. Now, how nice is that? If the vehicle in your lane, say an old truck or
tractor, was going slow, the driver would almost always pull over onto the shoulder
to let you past. Then you were supposed to wave and he would wave back. If you
just wanted to go slower and look at all the wildflowers, and Spring is a
surprising circus of them, then you can pull over and trade waves—common
courtesy then, but now easing out of fashion with the newcomers.
People were so darn friendly it made me giddy at first.
While looking around on Austin’s 6th Street one morning (that’s the
city’s version of New Orleans’s Bourbon Street) I saw a big old boy getting out
of his pickup truck. The interesting bit was that on the back of his belt it
said: Jim Bob.” Imagine going about with a name label like that, as if life was
a constant convention. When he turned around I said, “Jim Bob, how’ve you
been?”
He looked at me closely as he shook my hand and said, “Fine.
Fine.” He was thinking, no doubt, that he didn’t know me from Adam’s house cat,
but maybe he’d been drunk when we met. I knew his name, after all.
“How’s the family?” I asked, since just about everybody has
one.
“Fine. Fine.”
This went on for a spell until he pried himself loose and
went about his day, still shaking his head.
The range of characters varied, ripe picking for a writer.
The brakes went out on my car once out in the middle of nowhere, which is
easier to find than you think in a state this big. I drifted into the parking
lot of an unpainted building that turned out to be a mechanic’s shop. I asked
the fellow who came out if he could fix the car, and he said that reckoned he
might could do just that. “Might could” is common speech, as is “fixin’ to go
yonder.” As he spoke, though, I found myself hypnotized by the fact that he had
only one tooth in his head. It was a solitary top front tooth that was green
and had eroded in the middle until it had a waist. I could NOT take my eyes off
that tooth. I tried to make myself, the way you do if someone’s showing too
much cleavage, but I wasn’t strong enough. I stared and stared, thinking all
the time, “Do NOT say anything about the tooth. Don’t say, ‘That’s the tooth of
it’ or anything of the like.” I was mesmerized. Then I began to think of a
pimento cheese sandwich on white bread with one bite out of it, and the bite
mark showing the imprint of that lone tooth. I tell you, it about killed me to
keep my mouth shut. And I haven’t used this fellow in any book I’ve written
yet.
Texans also have fussy ways about how town names are
pronounced. If you don’t catch on, they have phrases like, “It’s Burnet, dern
it, learn it.” Carol Burnet had best never visit. And the town of Tow is pronounced
to rhyme with “now.” I don’t know what they’ll do if they ever get a tow truck.
There is much to be learned from the way people pronounce the simple word
“oil.” You can detect geographical origin within the state as times depending
on whether you hear: “earl,” “ol,” or “oh-well.” I’m told the young ladies of
Dallas are encouraged to ask suitors, “Does your daddy have any oh-well on his
spread.” (Spread means property or ranch, and ranch is not the dressing.) I’m
not sure if that Dallas yarn is true or apocryphal, like the saying, “Contrary
to popular belief, armadillos aren’t born dead beside the road.”
The other aspects useful to an anthropologist of an author
are the physical ones. As I said, anyone thinking of Texas as being flat as a
fritter everywhere is due for a surprise. Anyone hoping to see a saguaro cactus
is in for another surprise. There isn’t a single native one in the state,
though I have yet to learn of a New York publisher that hasn’t put one on the
cover of a book set in Texas. Another surprise is that there is only one
natural lake in Texas and it shares the border with Louisiana. ALL other lakes
are man-made. And we have droughts, and I have put those to good use in books.
The critters round out the spice one can sprinkle into a book.
From hand-sized furry brown tarantulas, scorpions, fire ants, mountain lions,
to coyotes there are many colorful natives to choose from. I once got out of
the car near a bridge over a long wash where I had actually seen some water.
Seeing water in a West Texas river is not common. That’s why they are called
washes or draws and only get business during floods when the rare rain hits the
hard ground. I almost stepped on a squashed armadillo while getting out. It had
been run over so many times it was the size of a manhole cover and no thicker
than a dime and was going to have to be buried in a pizza box. Down closer to
the water I wove through mesquite trees, mostly dead, and went past huge stands
of prickly pear cactus covered in yellow blooms. I heard a rattle, and stopped.
I thought, “Rattlesnake!” I looked down. The noise came from an enormous
grasshopper. I’m talking biblical pestilence big. I took a couple more steps,
and heard a rattle. I looked down. Rattlesnake! Its head was three inches from
my shoe. The next thing I recall I was back at the car, already in the driver’s
seat, may have even stepped on the squashed armadillo on the way in, or flown
over the top of it. When I got my breath back to normal I drove away from
there, returning a wave from an oncoming truck as I did.
The tool box is full of colorful details from a state like
Texas, or any state. The trick is having fresh eyes and savoring everything the
way a reader might.
A writer of mysteries, thrillers, westerns, poetry, and nonfiction books, Russ Hall has had more than twenty books published.
In 2011 he was awarded Sage Award, by The Barbara Burnett Smith Mentoring Authors Foundation--an award for the mentoring author who demonstrates an outstanding spirit of service in mentoring, sharing and leading others in the mystery writing community. In 1996 he won the Nancy Pickard Mystery Fiction Award for short fiction.
In 2014 he won First Place in the Austin International Poetry Festival.
His latest novel is To Hell and Gone in Texas. Al and his brother Maury haven’t spoken to each other in twenty years, but they’re going to have to soon when they are swept into the vortex of the Texas drug scene and come up against one of the fiercest cells of the Mexican mafia. Maury’s life as a lady’s man is in stark contrast to Al’s woodsy life as a retired detective. Yet they’re brothers, and blood will have its way, especially when others seek to spill it in the brutal style that is becoming their trademark.
You can find out more about Russ and his books at his website, http://www.russhall.com/.
Today we feature Ted Cross,
author of The Immorality Game. Ted has spent the past two decades traveling
the world as a diplomat, all the time dreaming about writing fantasy and
science fiction. He's visited nearly forty countries and lived in seven,
including the U.S., Russia, China, Croatia, Iceland, Hungary, and Azerbaijan.
He's witnessed coup attempts, mafia and terrorist attacks, played chess with
several world champions, and had bit parts in a couple of movies. He currently
lives in Baku, Azerbaijan with his lovely wife and two teenage sons.
