We received a phone call a few days ago from a new writer, Rick Gavin, who was driving up from Louisiana and wondered if we'd like him to stop by and sign copies of his debut novel, Ranchero. It just so happened we had a big stack of his books because a.) the novel is set in the Mississippi Delta, b.) we thought it was hilarious and irreverent and full of colorful reprobates we knew, and c.) it's one of our current Turnrow 20 titles.
We encouraged him to stop at Turnrow, expecting to see him pull up out front in a Ranchero or El Camino or something other cool car from the 1960s/70s. We'd heard Mr. Gavin — or "Gavo," as his small coterie of followers have dubbed him — was reclusive and not given to book signings and literary discussions. He framed houses and hung sheetrock in north Louisiana and didn't fraternize with bookish sorts. Or so we supposed. When he arrived (in a Nissan), we found him to be quite affable and willing to discuss his work. He was pleased that we'd ordered so many copies of Ranchero and thanked us for reading and selling it. (He wasn't terribly keen on having his picture made, hence the obscure photo above.)
There was even a small group of fans of the book who'd caught wind of his visit and showed up to say hello and get their books signed. We all had a nice lunch on the Turnrow backporch, where he informed us that he'd written most of the book sitting in a parked car and that there was another book featuring the main character, Nick Reid, due out next year.
In Ranchero, Rick is the repo man who pays a visit to an Indianola deadbeat named Percy Dwayne Dubois (pronounced "Dew-boys — front-loaded and hick specific"), only to take a lick on the head with a fireplace shovel and have his car stolen for his trouble. Not just any car, Nick's 1969 Calypso Coral Ranchero was a gift from his sweet, doting landlady and, while impractical, is precious enough to warrant a mayhem-filled chase up one side of the Delta and down the other.
Along the way Rick and his colleague Desmond ("huge and eggplant black and had a way of looking feral") track down the deadbeat Dubois, who has passed the car along to a series of ever slimier thugs. Each accomplice they discover joins their motley search team, all leading to the back swamp hideout of a menacing coon-ass meth lord named Guy.
Imagine Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiassen down a Mississippi skid row and you'll know what sort of hilarity and mayhem awaits you in Ranchero. This novel stands out for its biting comedy and its (barely) exaggerated setting, from one Delta town and Sonic Drive-In to the next — Greenwood, Greenville, Yazoo City, Indianola and beyond. Everyone gets a dose of satire. Keep in mind, this is not the bucolic Delta of tourist brochures but the dead-end Delta of "antibiotics and midnight sutures," a Delta known but never captured with such terrible and fun-loving glee:
Life in the Delta demands sweet-tea existentialism, a view of the world narcotic at bottom and sugared over with courtliness. Heat and mosquitoes in summer. Scouring wind in winter. Anaemic prospects lingering through the year. People steal and drink. They work when they can, get along as best they're able, and the mood of the place extends to the local police as well. ...(N)o law man in the Delta ever gets terribly worked up. Such a wealth of civilians about are given to rampant shiftlessness that a cop with his gun out would find himself faced with too damn many people to shoot.
Nick, an eastern hillboy, is at constant odds to make sense of the place but has a clever sense and always an entertaining turn of phrase. We've been recommending the novel heartily to locals, telling them only to thicken up their skins and come ready to laugh and wince.
We were curious how Gavo had his finger so firmly on the pulse of the Delta, and he alluded to some time running with rough company around these parts in his youth. Whatever happened in those days stuck to him, and we have this riotous novel to show for it.
If you'd like a rare signed copy of Ranchero, order one at our website.
