Behind the Mystery: The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright
In February of 2020, while having one of my last restaurant dinners before lockdown, I got a voicemail from my mother. She sounded light-hearted, if not outright chipper, her Southern accent the kind that can stuff five syllables into a sigh. “Someone tried to murder your father,” she said. “Again.”
I briefly lowered the phone and looked around the dinner table. The hell?
“He’s perfectly fine,” my mother continued on the voicemail, “but they haven’t caught the shooter. Cops say he knows where you live, so lock your doors at night! Okay, love you, bye.”
During certain moments, such as when you’ve found out someone tried to kill your father and that he may also try to kill you, only one kind of response is appropriate. I replayed the voicemail for my friends at the table, after which we had a good long laugh.
That voicemail coincided with my first thoughts on what would become The Queen City Detective Agency. Although my previous two novels are considered literary, an arbitrary designation that like the phrase “Bless your heart” in the South can be both a compliment and a slight, I wanted my next book to fall under an equally arbitrary genre distinction. I wanted to write a crime novel.
Lord knew I’d put in plenty of prep work. I’ve read more novels by Elmore Leonard than by any other single author. My favorite movie when I was two-years-old was the very R-rated buddy-cop thriller 48 Hours. But my best preparation for writing a crime novel could be found in the jagged outline of signs for hourly-rate motels serrating the night sky on my way home from a little-league game; in the headlines about numbers-running, drug-trafficking, and loan-sharking I skimmed while turning to the funny pages; in a dying cityscape maculate with graffiti tags and bullet holes: Meridian, Mississippi.
Due to my father’s job as the district attorney, a position that led to numerous attempts on his life, including the one my mother spoke about in her voicemail, crime in my hometown was not an uncommon topic of discussion around the house. Meridian has a long, sad history of bloodshed. The KKK bombed a local synagogue in 1968. Suspects from the infamous Mississippi Burning murders were tried and convicted in a Meridian courtroom.
Every hometown is mythic to an adult looking back on their childhood. With Queen City, I tried to capture that sense of scale, how our personal histories fossilize into collective ones, while interrogating Meridian’s lineage of violence, and I hoped to leaven those serious, still-relevant themes with a wry, comic sensibility. This novel’s a love-hate letter to my hometown, a failed assassination of the place that made me—told with both a wink and a smile. That’s just how I was raised. “I’ve lived with your father for over forty years,” my mother said after I asked why she’d sounded so casual about the most recent attempt on his life. “I understand good and well why someone would want to kill him.”
I can sympathize with that feeling. I wrote an entire book about it.
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