In a new Southern noir novel to be released this month, racially motivated murders terrify and inflame the citizens of Memphis, circa 1955. Detective Burdette Vance is paired with Eustace Johnston, a new trainee and one of the few Black officers on the police force, and the two are handed a case that threatens to ignite long-smoldering tensions in a Memphis divided by racial injustice, where the old political structure is crumbling. Such is the setting of Thomas Dann’s debut novel, Midnight in Memphis (Crooked Lane Books).
“Growing up in the South, it’s a land of storytellers, and it’s something that I was always exposed to,” says Dann, a fifth-generation Memphian. “I loved telling stories and developed a reputation among everyone I know as a storyteller.”
At some point, the urge to tell a story of his own began to take hold. It was a feeling he just couldn’t shake, and after all, why should he? Dann is a voracious reader, a storyteller by inclination, and he has professional experience as a felony defense investigator and lawyer (more on that later) that lends itself to the careful construction of a realistic mystery novel. So he began researching his hometown during the 1950s. A good rule of thumb is to set a story during a period of change, and 1955 — with the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, the dissolution of the Crump Era of Memphis politics, and the mixing of gospel, blues, and country that would herald the advent of rock-and-roll — was a veritable lightning rod for change in the Bluff City.
“I’m sitting here in my office right now,” Dann tells me over a lengthy and enjoyable phone interview, “looking at a shelf of books that’s maybe five feet across, and they’re all books like The Editorial We by [Edward John] Meeman, who was editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, From Boss Crump to King Willie [by Otis Sanford], and Beale Street Dynasty [by Preston Lauterbach].”
“I did so much research,” he says. “I know much more about Memphis from having written this book than I did from growing up there.”
On Writing, Pace, and Plot Twists
photograph by beryl dann
Because Midnight in Memphis is a work of historical fiction, Dann had to adhere to an accurate and believable historical framework. Within the bounds of that setting, though, the author was free to follow his intuition as to who his characters are on a personal, human level. That, he says, is one of his favorite parts of the business of fiction-writing.
“It’s such an enjoyable process to see these characters that you create take on a life of their own,” Dann says. “It’s a challenge, but it’s the kind of challenge that makes writing really fun.”
Of course, Dann is not only bound by the rules of the setting in which his story is set. No matter how well-rounded its characters or lofty its literary aspirations, a novel must also engage the reader, inviting them to keep turning the pages. No less important, every genre has its own sets of tropes with which an author must engage, whether to subvert them or adhere to them.
That does not mean a piece of genre fiction must be formulaic — every mystery novel need not be a “whodunnit” in which the reader’s primary goal is to solve the mystery before the detective. There must actually be a mystery, though. Midnight in Memphis succeeds on all these levels. Its character work is finely tuned, and the central mystery of the novel is sufficiently engaging to keep the pages turning. Its protagonists, Detective Vance and Officer Johnston, may fit into a familiar groove of “wise and weatherworn detective and up-and-coming new recruit,” but Dann uses that trope to tease out elements of their characters, and to shine a light on the prevailing social structure of the time.
“I was just down in New Orleans at a conference called Bouchercon. It’s the world mystery writers conference,” Dann says. “I moderated a panel on the concept of plot twists and what drives them. Some people are very structured about it, but to me there’s an aspect of it that’s like, ‘When you get to a fork in the road, take it.’ I think that’s a Yogi Berra euphemism. What drives you to take one fork or the other is what feels right for that character, so it ends up being ultimately character-driven, and sometime after that you have to figure out where the plot goes. I feel that the plot needs to drive the development of the characters.”
Character work is of particular interest to Dann, but he never neglects the needs of a good mystery novel. The crimes are sufficiently grisly, the city’s political machine’s connections in unsavory places are not ignored, and the author makes sure to, as he says, keep the pace going.
“My editor had me take out one of my favorite scenes of the book because it interfered with the pace of the novel,” he admits. “I took it out, and she was completely right. It ended up being a side part of the plot that had more to do with character development than driving the plot forward, and it made me realize how you have to balance those two things.”
Murder is not only the catalyzing action of Midnight in Memphis; Dann had to take such time-tested writing advice as “murder your darlings” to ensure that his story worked on all levels.
If I Had a Hammer
Midnight in Memphis is a marriage of Dann’s interests, he confesses. The author is a self-proclaimed student of history — whose research tools for his debut novel run the gamut of the well-known books about the Bluff City and also include others about the Mississippi River, Native American prehistory, and more — as well as a staunch lover of fiction. In his debut novel, he juggles those two interests with seeming ease, also drawing on his history, both professional and personal, to make a fictional representation of his home town that feels authentic and richly atmospheric.
“My family goes back to the 1830s in Memphis,” Dann recalls. “When you get into the twentieth century and the rise and domination of the Crump political machine, my parents in the ’40s and ’50s were very much involved in trying to bring a two-party system into play. In any society like that, there’s a Faustian bargain that people enter into. Boss Crump made the streetcars run on time. He got public works things done, all those good things, but at the same time he was very oppressive in terms of how he ran his political regime, with swift retribution for those that opposed him. That kind of thing seems very current these days.”
At first glance, such a setting, that particular variety of autocratic, domineering political landscape might appear to be a dreary world in which to set a story. As Dann rightly points out, though, it is during such desolate periods and places that inspiration is most urgently needed.
“It’s a period of change, but whenever there’s a period of change there’s also a period of hope. Hope and resistance. Those are the two things that come into conflict with each other,” he says. “It was a fascinating time to think about.”
Dann draws on five generations of family history of political involvement in Memphis to inform the novel, alongside the aforementioned wealth of reference material.
Whether defending, prosecuting, or investigating, Dann was able to sample humanity in a fashion not often afforded to professionals outside the legal profession. Those experiences would one day be beneficial in the writing of his novel. At least with a fictional mystery, however, the blood on the sidewalk existed only in his imagination.
When he was younger, long before Midnight in Memphis, Dann decided that he would attend law school and become a criminal defense attorney. “While I was in law school, and for some time before and after, I worked as an investigator for a felony defense unit in the D.C. Public Defender’s Office. I would get to the crime scene and they hadn’t washed the blood off the sidewalk yet,” he remembers.
He could see what that experience of a frequent proximity with crime and those individuals accused of committing crimes was doing to his contemporaries, and he began to rethink his options. He couldn’t help but wonder if he really wanted those associations to be his steady diet of humanity.
For a time, the young Dann defended cases in Maryland on Thursdays and prosecuted cases in Arlington, Virginia, across the river on Fridays, so he got a chance to see what both experiences entailed. He says that he surprised himself by realizing that he found the experience of being a prosecutor more rewarding.
“These were minor crimes, of course, because I was still in law school. It was almost like doing social work with a hammer,” Dann says. “You get people who have somehow messed up in their lives and you negotiate a plea deal with them, and you’ve got something hanging over them to try to get them to straighten their lives out.”
Whether defending, prosecuting, or investigating, he was able to sample humanity in a fashion not often afforded to professionals outside the legal profession. Those experiences would one day be beneficial in the writing of his novel. At least with a fictional mystery, however, the blood on the sidewalk existed only in his imagination.
Walking in Midnight in Memphis
On a stakeout in Dann’s novel, Vance and Johnston are positioned between the two primary social poles of Memphis — The Peabody and Beale Street. Their geographic location works as a parallel for Memphis of the time, a city in which the cultural, recreational, and business hub for Black citizens existed just two blocks from the hotel lobby where white society congregated. The two locations held a huge cultural significance for two distinct populations in Memphis and the surrounding rural Mid-South, but rarely did those groups intermingle. That reality had already begun to shift, though. In Midnight in Memphis, as in the true history of the Bluff City, that social barrier has begun to be more permeable, hinting at future changes and a better future for all Memphis’ citizens.
“There is a certain body of thought that I shouldn’t even be writing a novel like this. I don’t really agree with that,” Dann says. “What I’m trying to write is something that is very hopeful. I try to hold onto the hope that things have the capacity to get better, that people have the capacity to be better.”
That longed-for ray of hope permeates Midnight in Memphis, but so too do old hurts and aging social structures that threaten its survival. As in the real world, moneyed interests and loopholes in the law regulate the ebb and flow of social change. Without giving away spoilers, as in all good mysteries, there are personal and financial motivations at play. Banks are powerful entities bent on outlasting social orders, and even the novel’s seemingly innocent players hope to benefit from legalities that govern the city — such as the “interstate commerce and all that,” which governs potential money-making ventures such as floating riverboat casinos. Through it all, Dann weaves a thread of character growth of the tension between the predictability and uncertainty of humanity.
“Burdett always thought that faith in human nature is a fickle thing. People may think that they know you through and through, but it turns out that there was a deep dark part of you that they did not know at all,” Dann writes in Midnight in Memphis. “He wondered sometimes what shock and surprise a victim must feel in his last dying thoughts, because no one who dies at the hand of someone they know really thought the other person had it in him to pull the trigger or plunge the knife.”
The author is possessed of a knack for a hard-hitting turn of phrase, and his punchy prose carries the reader through the novel.
When picking up a mystery novel, this humble book reviewer’s tastes usually tend toward hardboiled crime fiction and California noir, Dann’s Midnight in Memphis is a well-crafted Southern noir that should delight any fans of the genre.
Thomas Dann will launch his new novel Midnight in Memphis with a book-signing event at Novel bookstore on Tuesday, November 18, at 6 p.m.
