Hell at the Breech: A Novel [Hardcover]

Tom Franklin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2003

In 1897, in the rural southwestern area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered. Seeking retribution, his outraged friends -- mostly poor cotton farmers -- form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe are responsible. The hooded members of this gang wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre, where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty.

Caught in the maelstrom of the Mitcham War are four people: the county's aging sheriff, sympathetic to both sides; the widowed midwife who delivered nearly every member of Hell-at-the-Breech; a ruthless detective who wages his own private war against the gang; and a young store clerk harboring a terrible secret.

Based on incidents that occurred a few miles from the author's childhood home, Hell at the Breech chronicles the dark events of dark days, events that lead the people involved to discover their capacity for good, for evil, or for both. It is a mesmerizing and unforgettable display of talent by a writer of immeasurable gifts.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This immensely accomplished novel by the author of the Edgar Award-winning short story collection Poachers is based on a real-life feud in the 1890s that pitted the underclass-poor, mostly white sharecroppers-of Clarke County, Ala., against the land-owning gentry who could and did control their fate. But that simple summary does not do justice to the complex and incredibly violent events that shook the community. The seeds of the violent uprising are planted when Macky Burke, a poor, white teenage orphan living with his grandmother, the widow Gates, accidentally shoots local merchant Arch Bedsole during a holdup. Arch's enraged cousin, Quincy "Tooch" Bedsole, a down-at-the-heels farmer, cultivates those seeds with a mixture of resentment, greed and a desire for vengeance. He forms the "Hell-at-the-Breech" gang, made up of criminals and struggling white tenant farmers who but for their guns are nearly as powerless as the former slaves they compete with for work. Hell-at-the-Breech terrorizes Clarke County, exacting frontier justice (and cash) from the exploitative landowners, driving black sharecroppers out of the county and menacing the white farmers who are too law-abiding to join their ranks. Fighting the outbreak of violence is Sheriff Billy Waite, an essentially good man trying to keep the peace and administer justice in a lawless world. Despite an unremitting catalogue of violence, this gory book is a pleasure to read for its clean, unexpected turns of phrase (in a cotton field, "each tuft [is] white as a senator's eyebrow"); the laconic humor of its characters ("Rumors fly out of Mitcham Beat like hair in a catfight"); and vibrant, complex characters who spring from the pages. Franklin may have used history as a starting point, but he imagines the events in human terms, creating a book that transmutes historical fact into something much more powerful, dramatic and compelling.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* What starts as an apparent accident leads to a feudal killing spree in Franklin's accomplished account of a true story he heard while growing up in Alabama. When teenage brothers William and Mack Burke go out one night in 1897 to rob a passing horseman to get money for a whore, younger Mack's revolver accidentally discharges, hitting Arch Bedsole, a well-liked merchant and aspiring politician, as the boys run off and swear silence. But Arch's cousin, Tooch Bedsole, contends that men from an adjoining town are responsible. To avenge the killing he forms an unholy alliance of his Mitcham Beat countrymen, naming it Hell-at-the-Breech and targeting first those local men who refuse to sign its blood oath. It's up to Clarke County sheriff Billy Waite, who's feeling all of his 60 years and drinking too much, to stop the killing and curb the posse out to get the alliance. This is not a story for the faint of heart or stomach, with descriptions of violence so graphic and vivid as to seem cinematic. Yet Franklin, whose award-winning Poachers (2000) elicited comparisons to Faulkner, is a splendid stylist who explores moral issues and stocks this tale with memorable (if mostly unpleasant) characters, spinning it seemingly effortlessly to a final surprise twist. This is historical fiction at its best. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1 edition (May 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688167411
• ISBN-13: 978-1402571930
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #921,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in the hamlet of Dickinson, Alabama, which has a population of around 400 and is about half-white, half-black. I attended Dickinson Baptist Church for a while. I grew up a nonhunter in a hunting household, and I liked writing, drawing, and reading. I am the first member of my family to finish college.

When I turned 18, we moved to Mobile, and my father, a mechanic, opened a shop there. I went to the University of South Alabama, but I got such bad grades that my father told me he wasn't going to pay anymore. From there, I got jobs in a warehouse, at a plant that made sandblasting grit, and finally with an engineering firm, which sent me to a chemical plant where I spent years cleaning up hazardous waste. All through these jobs, I took classes at the University of South Alabama, paying my own tuition as I went, and finally discovering creative writing classes. I worked in my late twenties, finishing my BA and beginning my MA, in a hospital in Mobile, and also tutoring in the university's writing lab. From there, I got a job teaching at Selma University, an historical all-black Baptist college. I was neither black nor Baptist (not anymore) and was, usually, the only white person on campus. I taught six classes one semester, six different classes, and five the next. I also finished my comprehensive exams for my MA, finished my thesis (a short story collection), and worked on my foreign language proficiency exam.

I'd published a few short stories and won third prize in the Playboy College Fiction Contest (around 1991), and so I decided to pursue writing as a career. I applied to several MFA programs and wound up, fortunately, at the University of Arkansas. There I met my wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly. We got married at the end of that four-year-long program, and around the same time, I sold my first book, Poachers, and the idea for Hell at the Breech, to William Morrow. We lived apart that first year of marriage--it was hard getting teaching jobs in the same city--but moved to Galesburg, Illinois, where my wife got a job teaching at Knox College. I won the Philip Roth Residency at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and moved there for one semester. After that, we decided no more living apart.

I taught at Knox for a year, during which we had our first child, Claire. Then I was offered the John and Renee Grisham Chair in Creative Writing in Oxford, Mississippi. We moved there, planning to return to Galesburg, but never have. Beth Ann was offered a job at Ole Miss, and they named me an ongoing writer-in-residence--and there we remain to this day. Our second child, Thomas Gerald Franklin III (I'm Junior) was born in Oxford in 2005. We love Oxford and hope never to leave.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative Prose and Historical Details Abound, June 21, 2003

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hell at the Breech: A Novel (Hardcover)

In his highly praised short story collection, POACHERS, Alabama native Tom Franklin mined a neglected topic --- the modern South --- for narrative gold. He created vivid, visceral stories of present-day losers and rabble-rousers, and presented them as both regular frustrated humans and red-dirt legends.

Although his follow-up novel, HELL AT THE BREECH, is set more than 100 years in the past, Franklin's sensibility for gritty Southern realism remains in tact and in fact has become one of his defining traits as a regional author. Much like its predecessor, HELL AT THE BREECH refuses to romanticize the South, its inhabitants, or the violence they perpetrate, yet Franklin holds up his male characters as examples and exemplars of various strains of Southern masculinity, examining the morality of bloodshed in all its muscular complexity.

So many things work so well in this novel about a real-life gang war in rural Alabama that it's difficult to know which to praise first or foremost. Franklin's grasp of history is strong and confident; he ably recreates not just the language and the customs of turn-of-the-century Alabama, but also its lost landscape, a terrain that seems foreign at the turn of this century: "The woods were high all around, so green it felt almost cloudy, thrashers noisy in the bracken and sparrows flitting overhead, the ground slashed like paintbrush work with the shadow of pine needles."

Evoked in patient, sculpted sentences, the rough, unforgiving woods --- especially the impenetrable Bear Thicket that separates the city of Oak Grove from the uncivilized agrarian community of Mitcham Beat --- lend the story a sense of menace and mystery, and suggest an ever-changing world that seems impossibly vast. Introducing one of his main characters, a teenager named Mack Burke, Franklin writes that "the earth redefined itself around him, same as it had the day before and the day before that and as far back as his memory went, as if this dawn were no different than any other."

That dawn, however, is different for Mack: it's the first sunlight he sees after becoming a murderer, having accidentally shot a store owner named Arch Bedsole during a botched robbery. Arch was a prominent storeowner in Mitcham Beat, and his murder is locally assumed to be the work of city people trying to exert political power over the poor country farmers. In reaction, a group of Mitcham Beat farmers organize a gang called Hell-at-the-Breech to overthrow the city businessmen who hold liens on every crop in the area. Leading Hell-at-the-Breech is Quincy "Tooch" Bedsole, Arch's cousin and a deeply devious man who takes over Arch's store and indentures Mack to work as a stock boy.

As the Hell-at-the-Breech gang lash out at the farmers who won't join up and the city people who oppose them, Sheriff Billy Waite --- pushing 70 and nearing retirement --- tries to investigate, but finds only farmers too scared or too angry to take the law's side. Because he doesn't take immediate action, the townspeople see him as ineffectual, and because he drinks openly, they see him as a washed-up sot. But for Franklin, Waite's hesitation is a form of levelheaded mercy that few people in the novel possess or even recognize.

Waite's steady lawfulness and Tooch's manipulative lawlessness provide enough friction to ignite the forest between them, but for Franklin they represent nothing as simple as good and evil or right and wrong. HELL AT THE BREECH possesses a more complex morality: Franklin implies that hostility can be a useful tool but becomes evil when it is thoughtless and pointless, when men commit violence for its own sake. Both sides are depicted as righteous in their causes --- the Hell-at-the-Breech gang justified in its own push for independence, the city people merely protecting themselves from a threat --- but their violent actions are morally unpardonable. So many lives are lost, so many homes burned, so many farms destroyed, but nothing is won.

With HELL AT THE BREECH, Franklin lives up to the promise of POACHERS and establishes himself as an imaginative, intelligent, and important Southern writer. More importantly, he looks history dead in the eye and reveals how the Old South became the New South.

--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gripping Tale of Men Pushed to the Limit, July 25, 2003

By 

J. Mullin (Plantation, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hell at the Breech: A Novel (Hardcover)

Like many of the reviewers here, I was very impressed with Franklin's story collection Poachers, and especially the novella by the same name which dominated that award-winning collection. Franklin's lean style, and his obvious familiarity with the rural Alabama landscapes he portrays, remind me a little of William Gay's equally-fascinating depictions of rural Tennessee. When I saw that Franklin had a novel coming out based upon a real-life conflict set during late 19th-century Alabama, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Hell at the Breech did not disappoint.

The novel takes its time setting the scene, and giving the reader a true sense of Mitcham's Beat, a tiny slice of rural Alabama where poor farmers have too much work to do to stop and grieve over something like a dead spouse. Two teenage brothers, Mack and William Burke, sneak out for a night on the town and during a botched robbery, a man is accidentally killed. The victim, Arch Bedsole, is a shop-owner and local politician, and his murder prompts Arch's cousin Tooch Bedsole to form a gang, with blood oaths, who would set matters right in this neck of the woods.

We find out pretty early that the gang, calling themselves "Hell at the Breech", take their group quite seriously. You are either with them or against them, and you don't want to be against them. For obvious reasons, they don't handle rejection well since anyone approached about joining then knows their identity.

Over the course of the novel Franklin skillfully blurs the distinction between good and evil, creating some ambiguity in the reader as the violence escalates. William joins Tooch's group right away, while Mack, who is considered too young, keeps a low profile while working in Tooch's store, torn between his natural curiosity and his fear at learning too much. Lev James, one of the more ruthless of the gang, suffers tragedy at home and at the same time it appears he is about to lose his farm to foreclosure, although he claims to have made the required payment to the ruthless lender who is not about to cut him any breaks. Tooch himself, who starts out hell-bent for revenge for his cousin's unsolved murder, may have some complicity in his death, the cover-up, and may have bent the rules to take over the store. Even the widow, a mid-wife who raised Mack and William Burke, knows a lot more about the goings on at Mitcham's Beat then we are first led to believe. The self-righteos townfolk who comprise the "posse" demonstrate as much bloodlust as the gang they are after. Nothing is ever as black and white as we initially think.

Over the course of the novel, the tension escalates and a monumental conflict looms ahead. I loved the "gun for hire" character of Ardy Fox, whose brutal method for dealing with the lawless gang, under apparent authority from a local judge, reminded me of the ruthless game warden from Poachers. Sheriff Billy Waite is another character very skillfully drawn by Franklin, a fundamentally fair man with a weakness for whiskey, who is trying to make it to retirement in one piece, with a minimum of bloodshed on his hands. As the murders pile up and the Hell at the Breech gang veer further out of control, Waite realizes he is powerless to stop the mob mentality gripping the townpeople, who want quick results.

I read some commentary by the author, in which he revealed that while the conflict depicted in this novel actually occured in Alabama in the 1890's, there are conflicting reports as to certain of the details. After getting bogged down initially in the details of trying to sift through the evidence and get every fact right, a basically impossible task over a century later, Franklin eventually decided to use the known history as his roadmap, and tell the story his way. I am glad he did, as his debut novel is one of the better reads I have come across in a long time. Highly recommended.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brutal, Uncompromising and Brilliant, November 18, 2004

By 

Brett Benner (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hell at the Breech: A Novel (Paperback)

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf for over a year since the New York Times had placed it on their year end best of literature list.Finally getting around to reading it, it completely blew me away.Set in rural Alabama in 1897,an aspiring politician is murdered,and his friends form a secret group, Hell at the Breech,to exact revenge on the townpeople they feel were behind it. It's rough, very violent,and deftly captures the feel and time of a place so specifically you can almost feel the cold and smell the woodsap. A brilliant meditation on the evil and good that lies in every mans heart. Highly recommended.