Reviewed by Linda C. Brinson
THE QUEEN CITY DETECTIVE AGENCY. By Snowden Wright. William Morrow. 260 pages.
It’s 1985 in Meridian, Mississippi. It’s the Ronald Reagan era, morning in America, so they say. But in Meridian, once known as the Queen City but now more of a dump, there’s often more darkness than dawn, especially for the city’s Black people, and poor people, and anybody who’s not in the good graces of the corrupt rich white men who run things.
Clementine – Clem to those who know her – Baldwin is a former Meridian cop who started her own private detective agency after getting disillusioned with the police department. She’s also the daughter of a Black mother and a white father, although whenever people see her for the first time, all they see is the Black part, and she’s OK with that.
In one of the many ironies of this well written mystery novel, Clem’s white father is in prison. Her mother died giving birth to her, so Clem was largely raised by her father, except when he mysteriously had to be “away” and left her with Black relatives.
Even though having a white father gave her some advantages as she was growing up, she’s thoroughly disgusted with him, filled with resentment and anger.
Clem and her partner, Dixon Hicks, are hired to investigate the death of Lewis “Turnip” Coogan. Coogan died under mysterious – read that really odd – circumstances while botching an attempt to escape from the Meridian jail, where he’s being held for the murder of Randall Hubbard, a wealthy real-estate developer who was becoming wealthier by developing strip malls in Black neighborhoods. It seems Turnip, who’s not especially bright, sometimes works for the Dixie Mafia, and he claims Hubbard’s young wife hired him to take out her husband – but that he didn’t do it. He was set up, he says.
Turnip’s mother thinks her son was murdered, and she wants Clem to find ”the sons of bitches who killed him.”
Clem has no idea what she and Dixon are really getting into, but she soon begins to suspect that the murders of Turnip Coogan and Randall Hubbard are entwined with Meridian’s complicated underworld.
She also begins to realize that as she and Dixon probe more deeply into what’s been going on, they are putting themselves in danger. Clearly, there are people in Meridian who will go to any lengths, including murder, to keep their activities from being exposed. Too often, these people are in league with – or maybe are – those with power and position.
Clem is a complex, troubled person. She drinks too much and struggles with what she’s had to put up with living her life as a mixed-race Black girl, then woman, in 1980s Mississippi.
Somehow, though – and this is part of Snowden Wright’s genius – this novel isn’t as overwhelmingly dark as it sounds. There’s plenty of humor, including from the relationship between Clem and Dixon. He’s a blond, good-looking former local football star and Vietnam veteran with a loving young wife. Clem thought he was dumb as a post and hired him largely so that his white good looks and charm could accomplish what might be tough if not impossible for a Black woman PI – sort of the reverse of the stereotypical dumb blonde woman. Only, she soon learns, Dixon isn’t so dumb, and he’s also open to learning new things, including her perspectives on life in Meridian.
There are also a number of touching moments and insights that show some of the better sides of human nature,
Further proof of Wright’s genius is the way he, a white man, writes so convincingly, apparently easily, about a Black woman protagonist. He is a native Mississippian, and maybe that’s more important. He gets it.
The Queen City Detective Agency also offers plenty of twists on familiar racial stereotypes, starting with Dixon’s obvious shock when he and Clem visit her father in prison to pick his brain about their case. Dixon knew Clem’s father was a convict, but he had no clue that the man was white.
Who’s really behind the murders in Meridian? How deep does the corruption go? Is the Dixie Mafia real? Is it the reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, repackaged for the 1980s?
Read the book and ride along with Clem and Dixon as they unravel the truth.