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Dirty South

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"'Kids will listen to anything these days. Man, when I was a kid, we all wanted to be Muddy Waters. The way he sang about women and whiskey. Made me want to play that ole blues.'"
"'Not much has changed,' I said."
"'Except plenty," he said. "That music is against God. Makes thugs into heroes, women into things, and money above all.'" (Page 119)


Nick Travers's old friend JoJo doesn't think much of rap music. Neither does Nick but that doesn't stop him from helping his friend and ex New Orleans Saints football teammate Teddy Paris. Teddy has a major problem and will be dead within twenty-four hours if Nick doesn't help. Nick has a history of being able to find things and in this fourth novel (Crossroad Blues, Leavin' Trunk Blues, Dark End of the Street) of the series; he may have finally used up all of his luck.

Teddy Paris has a rap star prodigy working for his label, Ninth Ward Records. As the age of 16, the young star goes by the name of ALIAS. While he might be street wise, he was set up and conned out of more than $700,000. With his company already on the edge of financial collapse, Teddy needs that money back to pay off a cross-town rival who wants ALIAS and his money making income for himself. Teddy is trying desperately to keep ALIAS out of his competitors clutches for business and personal reasons and is also trying to stay alive as the rival has threatened death if he doesn't get his money. So, Teddy needs Nick, who has a few ideas to find and recover the missing money.

Nick has done this sort of thing before by tracking down missing royalty money for some of the old blues singers and this is fairly close to doing that. But normally, he hasn't had this kind of deadline and with no one else to help, Nick never thinks twice but jumps into the mess with both feet. There isn't anything he won't do to help his former teammate and his immediate goal is to buy a little time. He starts looking for the players who took the money along with the reluctant ALIAS. Before long, as secrets are exposed, the trail twists and turns in violent and unexpected ways with the hunters becoming the hunted before a final violent confrontation in speedboats out on Lake Pontchartrain.

As always, Ace Atkins spins a dark tale of greed and murder in and around New Orleans and the Deep South. Unlike James Lee Burke who has written about the same areas, Ace Atkins never sways the reader's focus away from the ugliness by pretty prose concerning flowers, the skies above, or the muddy waters. One isn't given a respite in Atkins' books, as once he draws you into the muck and mire of the human soul, he does not let you go before the last dark page.

The world Nick Travers inhabits while rooted firmly in the present constantly reminds one of the past especially in regards to the music of the blues. Throughout the series, the blues has been a constant companion, if not a character into its own right, and that is true in this novel as well. Through well placed snippets of information, the author and his signature character remind the reader that the rap of today, in all its forms, was built on the back of the blues.

While JoJo and his wife Loretta and a few select others make another reappearance, one gets the feeling that this every well might be the final Nick Travers mystery. A story arc branching across four novels is complete, some loose ends are tied off and by the end, Nick has finally dealt with old ghosts that have bothered him throughout the series. If this is the end, it was one heck of a ride and great knowing you, Nick.


Book Facts:

Dirty South
By Ace Atkins
www.authortracker.com
William Morrow
2004
ISBN # 0-06-000462-2
Hardback

Kevin R. Tipple © 2004

Recently, a gentleman at a major record company played his weekend's voice mail recordings for me. The messages were all from erstwhile rappers, all in rhyme, and had the common theme of "give me a deal." Most of them did not even leave contact information, and some of them exhibited an undercurrent of desperation. While not all rappers come from impoverished or humble beginnings, certainly many of them do. The music provides them with the promise and, more often than not, the illusion of a way out of their circumstances.

Music has been one of the primary themes of all the novels of Ace Atkins. His creation of Nick Travers as a blues scholar and occasional rumpled knight is somewhat unique. While the previous Travers novels have been primarily concerned with blues and soul music, DIRTY SOUTH, Atkins's latest offering, concerns the rap/hip hop industry. DIRTY SOUTH, in keeping with the subject matter of the music, is much grittier and darker than his previous work. It is also unquestionably his best to date.

Nick is reluctantly dragged into the hip-hop scene by Teddy Paris, a former teammate of his on the New Orleans Saints professional football team. Teddy and his brother Malcolm are living large as the heads of Ninth Ward Records, a wildly successful New Orleans rap label named after the somewhat notorious Crescent City neighborhood (referred to locally as "The lower Nine -- where they don' mind dyin'"). Teddy is in a huge jam. His latest star, a fifteen-year-old rapper named ALIAS who has grown up quickly and hard, has been scammed out of $500,000 in Ninth Ward Records money by a team of operators that nobody seems able to locate. Teddy, desperate for money, borrows a half-million dollars from a local hard-case named Cash. The loan, and an extra $200,000 for "interest and time," comes due in 24 hours.

Nick begins beating the rough bushes of New Orleans to discover who the scam artists are, and where the money is, looking for any information that will lead to the recovery of the money and the rescue of his friend. Cash, meanwhile, is quite clear that he is not as interested in recovering his money as he is in taking over ALIAS's career. When violence begins to strike closer to home, Nick moves ALIAS to the Mississippi Delta where Nick's friends, living blues legend JoJo Johnson and his wife Loretta, have resided since the events in DARK END OF THE STREET. But duplicity, violence and double-crosses dog Nick's efforts every step of the way right up to the book's surprising and cataclysmic conclusion.

Atkins's writing in DIRTY SOUTH fulfills the promise made in his previous three novels. His description of New Orleans' Calliope housing project, for example, reads like a travelogue through hell. Atkins also makes a subtle, pointed and dead-on accurate comparison between the rural and urban blues music of the past and the rap music of the present. Sex and violence in music is certainly nothing new, and both are plentiful here. DIRTY SOUTH is Atkins's best novel to date. We hope this critically acclaimed talent becomes a household literary name. Highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Ms. Klausner, I mean you no offense, but's it's obvious you did not read this book.

If you had, you would been pulled along by one helluva story, an ending that catches the reader off-guard and yet makes absolute sense, and some of the best, most lyrical writing I've read in a long time.

Ace Atkins' previous novels are all good, solid thrillers (Dark End my favorite of the previous three) that combine realistic Southern settings and historical accuracy with driving plots. Dirty South surpasses all three -- by far.

Atkins' four books are all set against a backdrop of 20th Century African American music and history. Crossroad Blues began in the Delta with Robert Johnson; Leavin Trunk took us via the Great Migration to the electric blues of Chicago in the early 50s; and Dark End was saturated in the Memphis soul of the late 60s. The next logical step in the progression of Southern black music is Dirty South rap out of New Orleans. Through it all, Nick Travers is a white man in a black world, at once accepted and separate.

But music -- and Atkins' knowledge of it -- never distracts the reader or slows down the narrative in Dirty South. It's the ghost that drives the story, allowing Atkins to do what he does best -- spin a tale full of friendship and betrayal, loyalty and treachery, honor and obligation, integrity and corruption.

In Dirty South, Atkins particularly shines with the chapters written in ALIAS's voice in a second-person narrative. He inhabits the young rapper's skin in some truly gorgeous passages that roll around in your head like poetry days later.

Don't be like Ms. Klausner -- read this book. I've already been through it twice -- once in a headlong rush to find out what happens, once to savor its impact. You'll love it.

Dirty South starts out with the premise "What would you do if you only had twenty-four hours to save the life of a friend?" That's the rap teaser. Rhythm and blues takes its time, and unlike rap, it sings about real things. As fictional blues legend JoJo says, "Rap doesn't elevate us...Money, money, money. Trashy women. That's not music. Glorifies people being ignorant. Blues is music."

Tell it to fifteen-year-old rapper named Alias, who started life abandoned by his mother, a drug addict and prostitute and got a dose of reality when his friends conned him. When you come from nothing, become a millionaire with a lakefront mansion in your teens, then have respect, women, money, song and fame yanked away from you because of cross-town rivals, you sing the why-me blues.

JoJo and Ace Atkins's hero, Nick Travers, aren't listening. The old man, who sits nightly drinking beer on his porch with his wife Loretta, waxes cautionary about rap: "That music is against God. Makes thugs into heroes, women into things, and money above all."

This is not just a mystery. Atkins makes this novel about rap sound like a 1930's blues song mourning popular culture, yet acknowledging its siren's smile of groups such as Alias that lures children, rappers and the rap culture are elevated into understanding as opposed to glorification. This mystery sings truth to power.

"Dirty South" is the fourth novel in Ace Atkins' Nick Travers series, and each book just gets better. The title refers to a style of rap that's become popular in the southeast. It's the most popular music in New Orleans right now, so it comes as no surprise that Nick Travers, a blues tracker, would become involved with the music and its practitioners.

Nick has traveled a long, hard road. A difficult childhood led to a truncated career with the New Orleans Saints, and eventually to a professorship at Tulane University teaching the blues. On the side, he's a blues tracker - finding, researching and investigating the history and the people of the music. Over the years, Nick's skills have allowed him to help several of his friends out of some pretty tight spots.

"Dirty South" is no different. Nick's old friend from his football days, Teddy Paris, is in a world of hurt. He's a music entrepreneur and has got himself into a mess with another producer to whom he owes money. If Teddy can't come up with several hundred thousand dollars in 24 hours, he'll be killed. The other producer, Cash, also wants to take Teddy's new protégé, a teenage rapper named ALIAS, away from him. It turns out that the money belonged to ALIAS, and someone has run a con on him. Nick starts looking for answers, but the answers only lead to more difficult questions. Teddy's brother Malcolm, his lawyer Terry Brill, the producer Cash, and even ALIAS himself have less than pure motives. As it turns out, saving Teddy's life is just the beginning. Nick is pulled into a dark world of love and betrayal that stretches back a decade, to the beginning of dirty South music.

Ultimately, "Dirty South", like all of Ace Atkins' work, focuses on the meaning of friendship. To Nick Travers, who has no biological family, his chosen family of friends is of paramount importance. He'll do anything for them. So the question becomes, who's betraying whom, and for what? There are no easy answers. To accompany Nick on his search for the truth is an exciting and thought provoking journey.

I never would have believed that I would read a novel about Rap music because I hate it. But, that was before I was introduced to Ace Atkins. I confess I got picked up and carried along with this story. The characterizations are excellent and while it was a little slow to me in spots, it definitely kept me reading. A lot about New Orleans and Mississippi, and since I live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast I am familiar with both, so I truly enjoyed the atmosphere of this read. In short, I will probably read another novel by this author as I did really enjoy this one.

Many authors incorporate music into their books; fewer can write with the rhythms and poetry of music itself. Ace Atkins proves with Dirty South he is one of the latter.

His latest book reads like a blues song brought to life. Moving to a lush, languid beat, it is a raw but fluid journey through the streets of New Orleans and the often troubled lives of his characters.

Of all the day jobs amateur detectives pursue, Nick Travers has perhaps the coolest of all: blues tracker. A former football player now a college professor, Travers spends his time tracking down the dying legends of the blues and recording their artists' stories as part of an oral history project.

All Nick is trying to do this time is help an old teammate who's in some serious money trouble, but he finds himself up to his ankles in alligators, fighting to save both himself and his friend.

Atkins has increased the energy of his plotting in Dirty South, taking Travers on a thrill ride through the ghettos of the Big Easy to the bayous of rural Louisiana. This is a trip you'll want to take.

Full disclosure: I've only read a couple of crime novels, the last one around '99 because I was told an English Bulldog played a prominent role in "The Last Good Kiss." Before that, my prior crime novel was read in high school when assigned "The Thin Man" for class.

More full disclosure: I've met Ace Atkins, bought "Dirty South," and am now celebrating my liberation from the world of pencil-necked academics who are scandalized by plots and carefully heroic character development.

"Dirty South" is commendable for its twists and action, but more is to be commended in the author's minimalism, nuanced description, characters and observation. An intelligent reader will understand that Nick Travers' POV is, like the rest of humanity, limited. Ace Atkins steps around the necessarily limited singular point of view by cleverly crafting scenes in minds of other characters. Appropriately, all characters' memories and perceptions of similar events are interpreted differently.

The author's strategy is also well-paced. Few novelists are able to create subplots within the text and manage the strings so successfully. Readers who might need to pause for breath after a high note will settle into pleasures of descriptions of New Orleans, blues music and Nick's complicated relationship with his girlfriend. The reader can almost hear the riffs of a Muddy Waters song in rolling passages, an indication of prose excellence.

Ace Atkins also made another strong decision within the work: while Nick Travers is the "good guy," he is not super-human. An excellent choice on the author's part to underscore the character's temptation by an attractive woman, his frustrations in trying to trust people around him, his confusion with regard as to whom he can trust. Nick Travers is not an "everyman's man" with his extensive knowledge of blues music and sheer athleticism, but the character is an exceptional man. Just the sort of guy to whom people would turn in life to help with their problems. And just the sort of guy an intelligent novelist spends time to craft carefully.

Word of praise for Atkins' treatment of animals: in an era where animals are props in the landscape, Nick Travers' world brings more than cutsie dogs to the forefront. Rather, the issue of widespread animal neglect and abuse is addressed early and often, with the prose describing race relations, in part, as symptomatic of general thoughtlessness and cruelty by humans. It is a rare author who understands that compassion does not pour from a finite vein.

Word of warning to afore-mentioned academics: You will find no self-pity, no excoriation of violence or male brutality in long textual passages. You will not find overly-sensitive fathers who strap babies in slings across their chests whilst they cook dinner for their wives, their mothers-in-law and write checks to their therapists after spending long hours trying to understand why their mothers didn't love them. What you WILL find are true-to-life men, most with warts, many with politically incorrect views, all with honest dialogue. What you will find are true-to-life characters in which good and bad men exist in all colors.

Nick Travers' job, like each person's, is figuring out what skin color hides.

I'm a believer. And making some room on the bookshelf for finely-written crime novels from authors such as Ace Atkins.

(Although Ace's "Dirty South" is some of the finest, most honest and least victim-pandering novels I've read, I am waiting to assign five stars to his crime novel featuring an English Bulldog.)

This novel started out well enough, but then seemed to drift between scenes, some of which seemed a little surreal. It took a while to connect the scenes and characters. This is another indestructable character who seems to stick his nose into various hazards and walk away alive.

Nick Travers becomes involved with an old football buddy who is in hock to an evil loanshark. Things are complicated by money missing from a the trust fund set up for a teenage musician. Travers is trying to get the loanshark off his buddy's back, and trying to track down the missing money.

The novel did not hold my interest very well, and I found myself skimming to get to the end. A lot of wheelers and dealers, some of whom get whacked. There seems to be a lot of name dropping, both people and places.

Teddy Paris and Nick Travers, both former National Football League players, became friends during an exhibition season when the former stole or borrowed depending on who tells the story the latter's jeep. While Nick became a music expert and part-time Tulane instructor, Teddy partnered with his brother to the tune of a multimillion dollar rap music label. The two men remain friends with the commonality of short football careers and a love of music.

Teddy knows that Nick has solved some music mysteries though his pal is an amateur sleuth so he asks if Travers will help him locate about one million dollars conned from teenage superstar ALIAS. Nick learns nothing from the self indulgent ALIAS, not even whether he was swindled or not. Nick begins making inquiries on the mean streets of New Orleans where he begins to learn that professionals take stars (entertainment and sports) for monetary rides. Those who make a living off the naive media studs warn Travers to turn his rap elsewhere or expect a permanent rest.

The fourth Nick Travers music mystery provides the audience with multiple intriguing looks at the darker side of the industry. As usual Ace Atkins displays his music acumen that is harmoniously blended into the story line. However, the plot lacks substance especially once ALIAS blows Travers off, leaving the audience wondering why and what the professor is investigating. Though not quite the usual Ace, DIRTY SOUTH sings enough of the blues to entreat amateur sleuth and music mystery lovers to listen to the melody.

Harriet Klausner