The Night Train was published by Little, Brown in 2011. Dwayne Hallston is a white teenager in a small North Carolina town in 1963 who loves music — country and rockabilly, the only music his world offers him. Larry Lime is a Black teenager who plays piano and guitar and knows the music that Dwayne has never heard: Ray Charles, James Brown, B.B. King, the sounds of the Black juke joints that exist on the other side of town, invisible to white America.
The two boys form a friendship that is natural (they share a passion) and dangerous (it crosses the most strictly enforced social boundary in the segregated South). They start a band — integrated, which is itself a provocation — and begin playing at venues that serve both races, navigating the unwritten rules of a society in which music can cross the color line even when everything else cannot.
Edgerton, himself a musician, writes the musical scenes with authority: the rehearsals, the negotiations with club owners, the onstage moments when the rhythm clicks and the racial categories temporarily dissolve. But he is too honest to pretend that music transcends racism — the friendship and the band exist within a system of laws and customs that can destroy both, and the novel’s tension comes from the reader’s awareness (sharpened by historical knowledge of 1963) that the world outside the music is not as forgiving as the world inside it.
Collecting The Night Train
First edition (Little, Brown, New York, 2011): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12