Murder in old Baton Rouge
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THE LEVEE
By Malcolm Shuman
Academy Chicago Publishers, $16.95 softcover
Colin Douglas is a 60-something true crime writer. When he witnesses the execution of a man about whom he has written, it dredges up old memories of his boyhood in Baton Rouge. Something happened in 1959 when he was 15, something terrible and he can’t remember it all. He’s long since left Louisiana, but now he feels compelled to go back, not only in distance, but in time.
Colin feels he actually knows more than he can remember and if he returns to the scene of the incident, it may jog his memory.
He wants to go back to the place he remembers …
“When I was fifteen we used to drive down to the levee to camp. We would go on Saturdays, as soon as the weather got warm, and we would build up a fire, set up a tent, and twist biscuit dough around sticks and cook beans,” he recalls. He and two of his teenage buddies had a special place to camp.
“It was a time before cell phones, and nearly all televisions were black and white. We would sit beside the leaping flames, even on the warmest nights, and look upstream at the lights of the city, as we breathed in the hot, rich smell of the river that stretched for a mile in front of us all the way to the thin line of willows on the other side.”
On just such a night, Colin is camping with three other boys when one of them takes off. Colin and another boy wander to the top of the levee in search of the departed boy, and then they see a car leaving the spooky cemetery in a field just across River Road. Colin goes to investigate, and it is there in the cemetery that he encounters a terrible sight that sends him running back to the levee. Yet he doesn’t raise an alarm. He’s not sure what it was he saw. Or if it was real. He goes home to his house in the city.
“We headed past the lake to Roseland Terrace, which would later become known as the Garden District, a tranquil area shaded by camphor trees and oaks. The district had been formed in the twenties when the university had been built on old Gartness Plantation, south of town, and a mix of university people, lawyers and state workers built the California-style bungalows, fake-Tudor cottages, and occasional Victorian monstrosities. Our own house, which my parents had bought right after the war, was a bungalow type with brick pillars holding up the screened front porch and a swing that rocked slowly in the breeze on rusty chains.”
The next day after the camping trip, Colin finds out what happened on the levee. A woman was murdered on the levee. She was stabbed and mutilated. It was a young Hispanic woman who taught Spanish at his high school. She was a single woman rumored to be having an affair with a married man.
The apparition that confronted Colin at the cemetery was the dying woman. He is guilt-stricken.
By adopting the voice of a man speaking in retrospective, Shuman is able to interject the sense of loss and regret that is the inevitable consequence of aging. When Colin goes driving around Baton Rouge to find old friends and familiar places, he experiences that peculiar sense of dislocation, cultural vertigo, that afflicts those who live somewhere, then leave and return after a long absence.
“Once I leave the university I get lost, it has all changed that much. The address I’m looking for is out on Highland Road, but it is in a subdivision that was a cotton field when I was growing up. Now it is a stylish middle-class community with twenty-five-year-old houses and well-kept lawns. I circle down streets that resemble mobius loops and end up in cul-de-sacs more than once before I find the street where the map says it should be.”
It gets worse. The camping spot is gone, washed away by the river. Has the river washed away all the answers too? Colin must find out. By the time you get about halfway through this short book (211 pages) you’ll be committed to finding those answers too. You will find, as Colin does, that there is no expiration date on the truth.
Shuman is a skilled crime writer. He unravels the crime slowly as Colin revisits the places he knew as a boy. The plot offers several misdirections, subplots and puzzles that Shuman completes by filling in backstory as he leads the reader to the conclusion of the story. This is not just a good genre book, it’s a good book period. It will appeal to mystery fans, crime fans and anyone who enjoys a well-constructed story.
By Malcolm Shuman
Academy Chicago Publishers, $16.95 softcover
Colin Douglas is a 60-something true crime writer. When he witnesses the execution of a man about whom he has written, it dredges up old memories of his boyhood in Baton Rouge. Something happened in 1959 when he was 15, something terrible and he can’t remember it all. He’s long since left Louisiana, but now he feels compelled to go back, not only in distance, but in time.
Colin feels he actually knows more than he can remember and if he returns to the scene of the incident, it may jog his memory.
He wants to go back to the place he remembers …
“When I was fifteen we used to drive down to the levee to camp. We would go on Saturdays, as soon as the weather got warm, and we would build up a fire, set up a tent, and twist biscuit dough around sticks and cook beans,” he recalls. He and two of his teenage buddies had a special place to camp.
“It was a time before cell phones, and nearly all televisions were black and white. We would sit beside the leaping flames, even on the warmest nights, and look upstream at the lights of the city, as we breathed in the hot, rich smell of the river that stretched for a mile in front of us all the way to the thin line of willows on the other side.”
On just such a night, Colin is camping with three other boys when one of them takes off. Colin and another boy wander to the top of the levee in search of the departed boy, and then they see a car leaving the spooky cemetery in a field just across River Road. Colin goes to investigate, and it is there in the cemetery that he encounters a terrible sight that sends him running back to the levee. Yet he doesn’t raise an alarm. He’s not sure what it was he saw. Or if it was real. He goes home to his house in the city.
“We headed past the lake to Roseland Terrace, which would later become known as the Garden District, a tranquil area shaded by camphor trees and oaks. The district had been formed in the twenties when the university had been built on old Gartness Plantation, south of town, and a mix of university people, lawyers and state workers built the California-style bungalows, fake-Tudor cottages, and occasional Victorian monstrosities. Our own house, which my parents had bought right after the war, was a bungalow type with brick pillars holding up the screened front porch and a swing that rocked slowly in the breeze on rusty chains.”
The next day after the camping trip, Colin finds out what happened on the levee. A woman was murdered on the levee. She was stabbed and mutilated. It was a young Hispanic woman who taught Spanish at his high school. She was a single woman rumored to be having an affair with a married man.
The apparition that confronted Colin at the cemetery was the dying woman. He is guilt-stricken.
By adopting the voice of a man speaking in retrospective, Shuman is able to interject the sense of loss and regret that is the inevitable consequence of aging. When Colin goes driving around Baton Rouge to find old friends and familiar places, he experiences that peculiar sense of dislocation, cultural vertigo, that afflicts those who live somewhere, then leave and return after a long absence.
“Once I leave the university I get lost, it has all changed that much. The address I’m looking for is out on Highland Road, but it is in a subdivision that was a cotton field when I was growing up. Now it is a stylish middle-class community with twenty-five-year-old houses and well-kept lawns. I circle down streets that resemble mobius loops and end up in cul-de-sacs more than once before I find the street where the map says it should be.”
It gets worse. The camping spot is gone, washed away by the river. Has the river washed away all the answers too? Colin must find out. By the time you get about halfway through this short book (211 pages) you’ll be committed to finding those answers too. You will find, as Colin does, that there is no expiration date on the truth.
Shuman is a skilled crime writer. He unravels the crime slowly as Colin revisits the places he knew as a boy. The plot offers several misdirections, subplots and puzzles that Shuman completes by filling in backstory as he leads the reader to the conclusion of the story. This is not just a good genre book, it’s a good book period. It will appeal to mystery fans, crime fans and anyone who enjoys a well-constructed story.
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