Snowden Wright’s novel The Queen City Detective Agency is pitch-perfect southern noir set in the 1980s.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“[A] scalding, shocking history-inspired mystery. . . . The mix of details about the omnipresent Dixie Mafia and an action-packed plot conveys a pulverizing atmosphere where everyone, including cops and city officials, share a secret, evil bond.”
In his own words, here is Snowden Wright’s Book Notes music playlist for his novel The Queen City Detective Agency:
The Queen City Detective Agency is set in an era of high fashion and low politics, extreme wealth and extreme poverty, expense accounts rising, moral accountability falling, and the government cheering it on.
I’m talking, of course, about the 1980s.
Music, like everything else, is cyclical. The ’80s holds similarities to today not only in fashion and politics but also in the tunes Casey Kasem told us about on America’s Top 40. Due to the era in which Queen City is set, the list below leans heavy on that decade, but I also drew inspiration chrono-omnivorously.
Jesse Winchester’s “Step by Step”
Pretentious books begin with an epigraph, but really pretentious books begin with two. Originally, the second epigraph for Queen City was a line from this song: “I mean to know, before I go, how come the devil smiles.”
Fortunately, despite my desire to use this song as an epigraph ever since I wrote a playlist for my first novel, my publisher’s legal department and the song-rights holder’s long response time forced me to go with only one epigraph: “I think you are not altogether American unless you have been to Mississippi; you are not a patriot if you start to faint when somebody breaks her thumb. Anyway, I never faint.”
That passage from Renata Adler’s Speedboat works much better on its own, I now realize. The entire novel is tucked into it like a mouse skeleton in an owl pellet.
Kate Bush’s “Waking the Witch”
In the most recent season of Stranger Things, a show that like certain novels milks the public’s ’80s nostalgia to satisfy its creator’s dastardly, rapacious gains, Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” plays a key role. That show is ridiculously successful, which means any novel that milks 80s nostalgia and Kate Bush’s catalog will be, too. Right?
Randy Newman’s “Burn On”
Queen City takes place in my hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, where, at the R&S Cinema on Frontage Road, I first saw Major League. The opening credits of that movie play against this song.
Burn on, big river, burn on.
Cleveland, Ohio, the subject of “Burn On,” has had nearly as troubled a history as Meridian, Mississippi. Cleveland has been called the “Mistake on the Lake.” Meridian, on the other hand, was once its state’s “Queen City” but now ranks eighth in population instead of second. Due to pollution, the Cuyahoga River, at the mouth of which Cleveland sits, has literally caught fire at least thirteen times. Meridian, on the other hand, has had more trouble with the FBI than the EPA; the “Mississippi Burning” murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were plotted in the city, and only a few years later the KKK bombed one of the local synagogues.
Although my previous two novels are historical, Queen City is undoubtedly a work of crime fiction. My hometown made that shift in genres almost inevitable. As the Cuyahoga does for Mr. Newman, Meridian goes smoking through my dreams, except that smoke smells distinctly of cordite.
New Order’s “Blue Monday”
With this novel, I challenged myself to focus on plot, to create a narrative that ticks like clockwork, while also staying true to that pervasive if not wholly accurate genre descriptor, “literary.” Queen City is a literary crime novel. It’s as attuned to plot mechanics as it is to the interiority of its characters. Whenever I felt myself losing sight of the latter, I recited the first line of this song: How does it feel?
TV on the Radio’s “Golden Age”
Indulge me a theory: Every adult’s taste in music is frozen in its own golden age, typically from a time in their twenties, a perfect moment toward which they spend the rest of their lives trying to return.
In the fall of 2008, I spent the day with a woman I’d recently broken up with but still deeply, desperately loved. This was in New York, the best city for autumn. She and I, who’d met in grad school, went shopping for “back-to-school” clothes. We stopped by the Strand to sell some books and then the Virgin Megastore to buy some CDs. While she got a haircut, I enjoyed a pint of Guinness at a dive bar in SoHo, because this story also takes place in a golden age of New York, a time when SoHo still had dive bars. That night, while playing dress up, modeling for each other the new clothes we’d bought, we listened to TV on the Radio’s latest album, Dear Science.
This song began. During the chorus, the woman I still considered the love of my life kissed me, not for the last time, but for the last good time. Freeze that moment. Know that it’s worth its weight in gold, which is to say, everything and nothing. Why else would I keep trying and failing to get back to it?
Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”
The working title of Queen City was Mississippi Goddamn. Even if I’d replaced the “a” with an asterisk, that title would still have clearly included a curse word, which can hurt sales. Here are a few of the alternates I considered before landing on The Queen City Detective Agency: The Queen City Limited (I still kind of like that one); How Come the Devil Smiles (too many crime novels these days have “devil” in their title); Mississippi Spur; Mississippi Redline; Mississippi Queen; Song of the South (snooze); and Dark Fear Road (the novel is much lighter than that title implies).
New Order’s “Age of Consent”
To quote song lyrics in a book, as I mentioned earlier, requires approval from and oftentimes a fee paid to the song’s rights holder. This song appeared in an early draft of a scene in the book. In an attempt to get around the rights issue, I rearranged the punctuation—because, you see, I am so very clever.
The original: “Won’t you, please, let me go / These words lie inside they hurt me so / And I’m not the kind that likes to tell you / Just what I want to do / I’m not the kind that needs to tell you.”
The rearrangement: “Want you. Please let me go? These words lie. Inside, they hurt me. So? And I’m not that kind.”
Any decent writer who hopes to be a good one needs an excellent editor. I’ve been lucky to have had the same editor for my past two novels, and I have her to thank for the above rearrangement not being in the book. My editor convinced me, as she so often does and as any great editor should, that I am not, in fact, clever.
The Police’s “Murder by Numbers”
How could a murder mystery set in the 80s not be influenced by a hit ’80s song that’s basically Serial Killing for Dummies?
William Shatner’s “That’s Me Trying”
This song, written by the novelist Nick Hornby, with Ben Folds and Aimee Mann on backing vocals, inspired not one but two of my works of short fiction. It nudged me toward the title of this piece, “That Was Me Hating You,” and I basically stole the entire idea of a parent (not) apologizing to the child they abandoned in this piece, “Little Pink Dancing Shoes.” I owe you a beer, Shatner!
Cracker’s “Low”
Let me make something clear. I am not cool. Although my formative adolescent years were spent in the ’90s, I neither listened to nor had ever heard of Pavement. I dug the Stone Temple Pilots more than Pearl Jam. All I knew of Seattle was gleaned from the movie Singles, which HBO aired approximately one billion times a day. This song was my idea of cool. And honestly? It still rocks.
“Low” and other songs like it didn’t influence Queen City. They influenced its sequel, set in 1991 along the Florida Panhandle. The Hurricane Party follows the protagonist of Queen City after she’s hired by the FBI to infiltrate a gang of eco-terrorists suspected of kidnapping a senator’s daughter.
Does that sound like a total rip-off of Point Break? You bet your ass it does. But hey, ripping-off Point Break worked out pretty well for The Fast and the Furious.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Snowden Wright’s playlist for his novel Play Pretty Blues
Born and raised in Mississippi, Snowden Wright is the author of American Pop, a Wall Street Journal WSJ+ Book of the Month and NPR Best Book of the Year. He has written for The Atlantic, Salon, Esquire, The Millions, and the New York Daily News, among other publications, and previously worked as a fiction reader at The New Yorker, Esquire, and The Paris Review. Wright was a Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center, and his small-press debut, Play Pretty Blues, received the Summer Literary Seminar’s Graywolf Prize. He lives in Yazoo County, Mississippi.