Lone Ranger

Guide Me Home, the final instalment of Attica Locke’s Darren Mathews trilogy, is a rich and satisfying conclusion to one of the great American crime series of recent years. The achievement of these novels – also referred to as the “Highway 59 series”, in reference to their East Texas setting – lies in the way they unravel mysteries in a fraught contemporary context while uncovering and exploring deeper histories.

For Locke, like her peripheral character Rey, history is “a missing tooth” that the “tongue never lost a taste for”. A central question underpins the series: do the rise of Donald Trump and the schisms that have emerged with it represent a fundamental shift or are they a continuation of a much longer story? When Locke’s hero, the bourbon-soaked Mathews, hands in his police badge at the beginning of Guide Me Home, in 2019, it is partly because “the violence, the stone-cold hatred” of the Trump era is “too much to hold”. But, just as he did in Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) and Heaven, My Home (2019), he is compelled to think historically too. When his uncle describes the tribulations of the 1960s as a time when America was “at war with itself”, Mathews recognizes “a strange echo” in the present.

Though the Highway 59 novels belong to a tradition of American crime writing, from Chester Himes to Walter Mosley, in which Black detectives struggle in racist police institutions, Mathews is a distinctive protagonist – not just a cop but a Texas Ranger, a representative of a branch of law enforcement much mythologized by white supremacists. Moreover, his inner conflicts about whether he is a “good or bad cop, or even what that meant for a Black Ranger” are played out in an era when lying is routine and “facts no longer seemed to matter”. In Guide Me Home Mathews’s crisis of identity is central, and so too has become his alcoholism.

The narrative begins with the unwanted reappearance of his mother, Bell, following his resignation. She had left him to be raised by his uncles after his father’s death, and her role in his life has been as a liar, a blackmailer and the possible cause of an indictment that could imprison him. When he encounters her here she is newly sober, and pleads with him to look for a missing college student, the only Black girl at the sorority house where she cleans. With Bell as an unlikely partner, and on the back of a weekend of chaotic binge drinking, Mathews follows a trail to a community called Thornhill, built around a meat-processing plant where residents get “free” housing and healthcare in return for working less-than-minimum-wage factory jobs – what he identifies as “modern day sharecropping”. And as the case of the missing student, whose family live at Thornhill, expands, he feels “himself driving toward a different kind of mystery” – of his own family’s past.

Central to this past – emotionally, psychologically, even perhaps genetically – is Mathews’s alcoholism, a “bottomless want” destroying his “ability to hope”. He understands his drinking as hereditary and fated, but also as a reaction to the burdens of being a Black cop in Texas, as well as a human being in Trump-era America. He reflects:

to slow down and really consider what was happening, to fully take in the ways reality itself no longer felt real, that it seemed everyone was lying, even if just to themselves about what a precarious situation we were all in, was to wake each night with a bone-rattling terror.

In Guide Me Home Mathews fights to stay sober and hopeful, and to confront this “bone-rattling terror”.

In addition to six novels, Locke has television credits on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us (2019) and Liz Tigelaar’s Little Fires Everywhere (2020); and, with her sister Tembi Locke, is currently adapting Bluebird, Bluebird. Guide Me Home, too, seems ripe for screen adaptation. Its narrative arcs overlap and enrich one another, and its tight chapters, with their cliffhanger endings, are highly propulsive. But the prose is rich too. The bluesy sounds and textures of East Texas are vividly realized, the “snow-cone stands and abandoned gas stations” of Highway 59, along with the country’s “toe-dip into dystopia, fascism under the guise of a return to better days, nostalgia as a slow, magnolia-scented death”.

Guide Me Home is thrilling historical crime fiction and concludes a series that has much to say about a period of history that still feels like a chaotic blur, even as it threatens to return.

Arin Keeble’s third book is Twenty-First Century Fictions of Terrorism, 2024

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