Redneck Press: Home of TOUGH

  Detective Novel by Craig Rodgers, 100 pages Death of Print Books, $15.00 by Hugh Blanton R eaders of Craig Rodgers have come to expect having more questions than answers at the end of his books, and Detective Novel (Death of Print Books, 2025) is no exception. Rodgers's prose is sometimes compared to Cormac McCarthy or Don DeLillo, and while his style is indeed very similar to both, he writes without the peacocky vocabulary. He opens Detective Novel with a man on a rickety, aged bridge over a river removing his shoes and watch. He ensures there's no witnesses around and jumps (he didn't see the vagrant camped in the brush of the riverbank). The vagrant climbs up to the bridge, puts on his new shoes and watch, and returns to his camp. No body is discovered, the vagrant says nothing, and Calvin Lond is reported missing. Detective Novel takes place in Oriel, a fictional town that has appeared in previous Rodgers books. A man sitting on a cot inside the building of the l...

T he night my father finally died, my mother and Janice and I were eating Greek food at one of the round Formica tables in the function room of the care facility, which was little used. People who came to the skilled nursing section didn’t stay long. They either healed or died. And either way, they were not in a mood to socialize. My mother was struggling with her pita pocket sandwich. The dressing and the moisture from the vegetables had softened the bread until it split and spilled the contents onto the waxed paper wrapping. She threw the mess down on the table and held her yogurt-smeared hands up in the air. “ Won’t someone help me?” I grabbed a handful of napkins and knelt next to her wheelchair. “ I’m sorry, Tommy. I can’t seem to hold it together.” I wiped her gnarled hands clean, the cheap paper napkins shredding and shedding bits on the floor like snow. “ We never wanted to be a burden to you, you know,” she said. Which was why, I supposed, they left the family in New Yo...

I t never failed. Alex Ingram would approach the checkout counter at the downtown King Drug—it didn’t matter what he was buying, it could have been a birthday card, a newspaper, a Snickers picked up at the register—and there, just ahead of him, would be a senior citizen, on their own or with a husband, wife, or friend. This snowy early spring day was no exception. This one, solo and full-bore into her eighties, a dusty burgundy wig slipped forward, to starboard from Ingram’s perspective, was making an additional purchase besides the items in her cart, the holiday-decorated tin of remaindered hard Christmas candy and a cellophane packet of black support hose. “I’ll take five of them scratch cards,” she said, pointing at the scuffed fiberglass lockbox. “And one of those, just one. For the $100,000 prize.” The cashier pulled the cards, rang them up, told the elderly woman the cost. Burgundy Wave—the name Ingram christened her with while he waited, leaning against the counter—her face p...

Z eke’s head was splitting from a migraine. The foreman Mariano was showing the new guy over in molds how to pull parts, how to be sure the resin had set before pulling the snowmobile cover from the mold. “We let you make a couple mistakes when you’re new,” the foreman said. “After that, it comes out of your paycheck.” Zeke watched the guy spraying the resin gun poke a wire into the nozzle. The women hired to polish the molds stood around griping that the mix wouldn’t set. Trouble was, if he came in drunk or hungover, his problems became your problem. Everything depended on getting the part out not a minute too soon or a minute too late. Same lecture he’d had years ago. Now stuck on the drill press, Zeke was miserable. Zeke Pattison didn’t need to be told he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He’d been mocked all his life for lacking the brains or willpower to improve himself. His parents died disappointed in him and left their house and small savings to charity. “ A minimum-...