Ace Adkins' "Crossroad Blues" is that rare novel that combines great writing and believable characters with an engrossing history lesson - in this case the enigmatic Mississippi delta blues legend Robert Johnson, murdered under mysterious and yet unknown circumstances in 1938. Only 27 at the time of his death, Johnson's music not only inspired rock greats from The Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton to Jim Morrison, but also the details of his life have been the source of myth and wild speculation, including an apparently widely held view that Johnson sold his soul to the devil - a notion that has certain substantiation through his twenty-nine recordings that survive him. "Crossroad Blues" is a fictional tale of another nine lost recordings thought to exist - the first in a series of four Ace Adkins novels featuring Nick Travis, a former New Orleans Saints defensive lineman turned Tulane University blues historian.
Adkins is a talented writer, capturing the fetid bayous and decayed grandeur of the Deep South with all of the steamy atmosphere of James Le Burke, but none of the attitude. Here is a guy with a love of the blues, an earthy passion for the culture, and a respect for residents of the tin shacks and seedy New Orleans back alleys - and the chops to capture it all in molasses slow-and-sweet prose. In this, his debut, Adkins introduces Travers, the Saint sidelined by a spectacular altercation with an unpopular head coach. When an obnoxious music professor from Tulane goes missing in Mississippi's delta country on a quest uncover some missing Robert Johnson lore, Travers reluctantly agrees to fetch him. From JoJo's Blue's Bar in New Orleans to cinder block juke joints in the delta, Adkins' writing is pitch-perfect - as close as words can get to reproducing Johnson's slide guitar and reedy thin tenor. Nick Travers is delightfully unpretentious, his lusty affair with red-headed blues hottie Virginia Dare provocative, his interactions with JoJo owner "Joseph Jose Jackson" and his elderly buddies vivid - but the real star here is Robert Johnson, shrouded in riddle; a ghost-like presence that fills the pages and draws the reader back into these unlikely roots of rock-and-roll. Keeping the action and intensity at a Mississippi-fevered pace is a dastardly cast of villains: the sleazy LA record-producer turned blues club owner, his hit man "Sweet Boy Floyd," but most interesting of all, Jesse Garon, a sadistic teen with an unhealthy Elvis obsession. Adkins takes the reader through a grand tour of tar papered hovels and country crossroads, traveling time and geography through blunt-edged violence and grisly murder to a white-knuckled climax and satisfying conclusion. In short, American crime fiction combined with music history for a uniquely entertaining read - one for the short list.
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Top reviews from other countries
Lyndon D. Johnson
DELTA BLUES IS DEEP ROOTED IN MY SOUL
Reviewed in Canada on March 19, 2018
Colin Slater
Thoroughly enjoyed the read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 7, 2014
