My friend, Aubrey Hamilton, loves Kris Lackey’s books, and suggested I share his books with all of you. Lackey has written four Bill Maytubby and Hannah Bond mysteries. The fourth, Ten-Acre Rock, was released yesterday. If you want to start at the beginning, go back to Nail’s Crossing.

Kris Lackey has published literary fiction in The Missouri Review, Wisconsin Review, and Cimarron Review.  Novel four in the Maytubby-Bond series, Ten-Acre Rock, will appear in 2023. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma, with his wife, Karleene Smith. His website is https://krislackey.com.

I’d like to welcome Kris Lackey as guest author today.

Kris Lackey on his Chickasaw Nation Mysteries

     When I began writing the first mystery in the Chickasaw Nation series, its detectives, Tribal Lighthorse policeman Bill Maytubby and country deputy Hannah Bond, were just character sketches. I could not visualize them clearly.  Faulkner claimed that all his characters appeared to him in visions and introduced themselves by name.  William Blake territory for sure. Many of my writer friends say they are taking dictation from their imagined people.  Clearly not a member of the visionary company, I was envious.

     In the first book, Nail’s Crossing, I sent Maytubby and Bond into the scrublands of the Rock Prairie in southern Oklahoma, embroiled them in a rural war against political corruption and violent rogues. I rely heavily on dialogue and little on exposition.  So as I wrote their dialogue, I suddenly realized it emerged from a negative space:  I wrote lines and then erased them because “Maytubby would not say this,” “Hannah would not say that.”  Poca a poco, their voices clarified.

    What do Maytubby and Bond—and Maytubby’s fiancée Jill Fox—look like?  I know their signal features—Bond’s towering form and deep scowl, Maytubby’s black eyes and hair, Jill’s skeptical side-eye—but I couldn’t describe them to a police sketch artist. Instead, by happenstance, I’ll see a person when I’m walking around Norman, Oklahoma, and think, “It’s Maytubby!”  That happened last week when I was in my local grocery:  a tall, stern, surveillant manager I had seen a hundred times was suddenly the very picture of Hannah Bond. 

     Likewise, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the novels—four of them now.  Every scene, every scrap of dialogue, changes the course of events. Again, I am envious of writers like J. K. Rowling who create a full storyboard before they begin, imagining every scene in advance like screenwriters.  I was heartened to learn that Stephen King, in his latest detective novel, confessed he didn’t know what was going to happen down the road.

     Why is it that my minor characters—fools, killers, police foils, clerks, mechanics—come to me fully formed and vivid, their speech rolling across the page?  Do my principals cow me?  Am I afraid to capture them, sap their power?  It remains a great mystery to me.

Ten-Acre Rock by Kris Lackey. Blackstone Publishing, 2023. ISBN 978821217565 (paperback), 220p.