It's always a pleasure to rediscover a noir writer from the days of pulp. After reissuing One for Hell, a classic novel by Jada M. Davis (1919-1996), Stark House Press has found the previously unpublished Midnight Road, set in the Depression-era West Texas where Davis grew up. This is rock country--a landscape of valleys, fields of green, cottonwoods and willows--making the novel a hybrid, a western noir. Like most noir novels, it's told in the first person, but the narrator isn't a grizzled detective--he's a 15-year-old boy, and the novel is really a coming-of-age story.
Jeff lives on a ranch with his mom and Bant Carr, whom he loves though he knows Bant isn't his father. (People say Jeff looks more like Kenty Hooker.) Their neighbor is crusty Old Trails and his daughter, Sam; she and Jeff are in love. She has a brother, Coy, who's getting meaner and meaner. And there's another brother, Fergus, shy, reserved, over-looked. They all come together in this tale of murder, attempted murder, scandal, lynching and violence. It may be a "quiet noir," as Rick Ollerman suggests in his introduction, but Davis's rural Americana can still be plenty dark and violent. Kudos to Stark House for bringing us Midnight Road. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher