Tom Franklin

Tom Franklin (born 7 July 1963 in Dickinson, Alabama) is an American novelist and short-story writer whose fiction is rooted in the red-clay landscape, racial tensions, and hardscrabble economics of the rural Deep South. His work occupies a distinctive position in contemporary Southern literature — darker and more violent than much literary fiction, more psychologically complex than most genre writing — and his best novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010), is one of the essential American crime novels of the twenty-first century: a book about race, friendship, and the weight of the past that operates simultaneously as literary fiction and page-turning mystery.

Life and Career

Franklin grew up in Dickinson, a small town in Clarke County, Alabama — an area of pine woods, sawmills, and small farms that provides the landscape for most of his fiction. He worked a series of blue-collar jobs before attending the University of South Alabama and then the MFA programme at the University of Arkansas, where he studied with the poet and novelist C.D. Wright. He teaches creative writing at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he lives with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, with whom he co-wrote The Tilted World (2013), a novel set during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

His debut story collection, Poachers (1999, William Morrow), announced a major talent. The title novella — about three feral brothers living in the Alabama woods, surviving by poaching, theft, and violence — won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Short Story and demonstrated Franklin’s ability to render extreme poverty and violence with a compassion that never condescends. The collection’s other stories are set in the same rural Alabama landscape, populated by men (and occasionally women) for whom violence is not exceptional but structural — a feature of an economy and a culture that has failed them.

Hell at the Breech (2003, William Morrow) is a historical novel based on the Mitcham Beat War, a real vigilante conflict that devastated a section of Clarke County, Alabama, in the 1890s. The novel follows multiple perspectives — farmers, vigilantes, a storekeeper, a schoolteacher — as economic resentment explodes into murder and reprisal. It is a brutal, vivid piece of Southern Gothic that draws on the tradition of Cormac McCarthy’s border novels while remaining rooted in a specifically Alabama sensibility.

Smonk (2006, William Morrow) was a departure — a picaresque, darkly comic novel set in 1911 Alabama that follows E.O. Smonk, a syphilitic, one-eyed, shotgun-wielding outlaw, through a landscape of violence, corruption, and surreal comedy. The novel divides readers — some find it brilliantly excessive, others find it gratuitous — but it demonstrates Franklin’s range and his willingness to push the Southern Gothic tradition toward the absurd.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010, William Morrow) is his finest work. The novel follows two men in a small Mississippi town: Larry Ott, a white mechanic who has lived under suspicion for twenty-five years since a girl disappeared after he took her on a date, and Silas “32” Jones, a Black constable who was Larry’s secret childhood friend before the races separated them. When another young woman goes missing, the two men’s past connections are reopened, and the novel unfolds as both a mystery and a meditation on race, friendship, guilt, and the ways that Southern communities create and maintain their outcasts. The title refers to the childhood mnemonic for spelling “Mississippi.” The novel won the CWA Gold Dagger and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and has been widely taught.

Major Works and Themes

Franklin writes about the rural South — specifically, the piney woods of lower Alabama and northern Mississippi — with an intimacy and specificity that resist the romanticisation that plagues much Southern fiction. His characters are poor, often violent, frequently isolated, and always shaped by the particular pressures of Southern history: racial hierarchy, economic deprivation, the legacy of slavery and Reconstruction, the unspoken codes of honour and shame. He writes about male friendship across racial lines with particular sensitivity, and his crime fiction is always, at a deeper level, about the social structures that produce crime.

Key Works

• Poachers (1999, stories, Edgar Award)
• Hell at the Breech (2003)
• Smonk (2006)
• Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010, CWA Gold Dagger)
• The Tilted World (2013, with Beth Ann Fennelly)

Collecting Franklin

Tom Franklin is an undervalued collectible in the Southern literature market — his work is of the highest quality, but his commercial profile is lower than some peers, which represents opportunity. Poachers (1999, William Morrow, New York) — the Edgar-winning debut — is the key rarity. First editions in fine condition with the dust jacket bring $30–$80; signed copies command $60–$150.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010, William Morrow) is the most commercially important title. First editions bring $20–$50; signed copies $40–$100. The CWA Gold Dagger and its adoption as a teaching text support steady demand. Hell at the Breech (2003, William Morrow) first editions bring $20–$50.

Franklin signs at Southern literary festivals — particularly the Oxford Conference for the Book and events in Mississippi and Alabama — and signed copies circulate with moderate frequency. His small bibliography makes a complete signed set very achievable, and his growing reputation as one of the essential contemporary Southern writers suggests long-term appreciation.