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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
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