From Publishers Weekly
The atmosphere is as thick as an East Texas summer day in Edgar-winner Lansdale's (The Bottoms) engaging, multilayered regional mystery, which harks back to 1958. Thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchel, Jr., has enough on his hands just growing up in Dewmont, Tex., when he literally stumbles on a buried cache of love letters. Stanley pursues the identity of the two lovers with help from the projectionist at his family's drive-in, an aged black man who quotes Sherlock Holmes and doesn't mince words about the world's injustices. As the truth of a gruesome 20-year-old double murder comes to light in the sleepy town, so do the facts of life, death, men, women and race for young Stanley. Unfortunately, this wealth of experience sometimes strains credulity. For instance, Stanley, his sister, Callie, and friend Richard witness a secret burial, see a local phantom, are chased by a murderer and barely miss being hit by a train-all in one night. As the older and wiser Stanley says of the past, "More had happened to my family in one summer than had happened in my entire life." The "down-home" dialect is occasionally overdone, too, with more ripe sayings than Ross Perot on caffeine. But Lansdale clearly knows and loves his subject and enlivens his haunting coming-of-age tale with touches of folklore and humor. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
If Mark Twain had written To Kill a Mockingbird or Summer of '42, it might sound something like Dick Hill's reading of A Fine Dark Line. Hill has the ear, the pitch, and the understanding to tell the story of 13-year-old Stanley Mitchell's all too fast coming-of-age in precisely the way author Joe Lansdale intended. In fact, Hill is the perfect match for Lansdale, who is no slouch when it comes to the oral storytelling tradition. Living in Dewmont, Texas, in 1958, where his parents own a drive-in theater, Stanley is completely ignorant of issues of sex, race, poverty, and violence. When he discovers a box of old love letters and journal entries near the ruins of a long-ago house fire, he unwittingly uncovers a forgotten scandal and several murders. S.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Lansdale makes a rich stew of memory and mystery in the voice of Stanley Mitchel Jr., who is 13 in 1958 and is writing down, in midlife, what he recalls. His parents own the drive-in in Dewmont, Texas; his dad calls his mom "Gal"; his sister, Callie, is turn-your-head pretty and feisty besides. Stanley finds in the burnt ruins behind the drive-in a cache of love letters. Stanley--innocent enough at the beginning of the story to still believe in Santa Claus--is fascinated by the letters and soon learns that the fire marked the deaths of two young women, long ago. Those deaths ripple through the pages, as Stanley struggles with knowledge of good and evil: his friend Richard's abusive dad; the black cook's stalker boyfriend; the drive-in projectionist who faces twin demons of age and alcohol. Stanley's mother, father, and sister are vivid, glowing personages. Stanley doesn't unravel everything, but race and power, and what people do to each other in the name of desire and religion, coalesce to a mighty climax. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
For young Stanley Mitchell, Jr., 1958 is quickly becoming a year of newfound joys and thrilling adventure. Beginning with the discovery of hidden love letters, and an uneasy meeting with Buster Lighthorse Smith, the Dewdrop Drive-in's elderly projectionist and former reservation policeman, Stanley learns about blues music, Sherlock Holmes, racism, and lost dreams. Through the natural course of growing up, he discovers the true nature of his father's heart; the love of his mother and sister and house servant, Rosy; and becomes involved in a forbidden world that exists beneath Dewmont, Texas, like dirt and bacteria beneath a beautiful carpet. Stanley enters a forbidden world of secrets filled with death and darkness, jealous lovers, and ghostly occurrences-until he finds the real murderer of the young girl who wrote the love letters he found, and becomes the murderer's next target.


Download Description
For young Stanley Mitchell, Jr., 1958 is quickly becoming a year of newfound joys and thrilling adventure. Beginning with the discovery of hidden love letters, and an uneasy meeting with Buster Lighthorse Smith, the Dewdrop Drive-in's elderly projectionist and former reservation policeman.Through him, Stanley learns about blues music, Sherlock Holmes, racism, and lost dreams. Through the natural course of growing up, he learns the true nature of his father's heart, the love of his mother, sister, and house servant, Rosy, and becomes involved with a forbidden world that exists beneath Dewmont, Texas like dirt and bacteria beneath a beautiful carpet. Stanley enters a forbidden world of secrets filled with death and darkness, jealous lovers and ghostly occurrences-until he discovers the real murderer of the young girl who wrote the love letters he discovered, and becomes the murderer's next target.


About the Author
Joe. R. Lansdale has won the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Part murder mystery, part coming-of-age story, A Fine Dark Line is a wonderfully rendered thematic companion piece to The Bottoms, Lansdale's Edgar Award–winning novel of murder and madness. This time out, Lansdale sets his narrative in 1958, in the fictional east Texas hamlet of Dewmont. Balancing gothic details -- buried secrets, sexual perversion, religious mania -- with the everyday pleasures and pains of family life, Lansdale filters his story through the eyes of Stanley Mitchell Jr., an uncommonly na￯﾿ﾽve 13-year-old who has just moved to Dewmont with his mother, father, and older sister.

The Mitchells own and run the Dew Drop Drive-in, a nostalgic artifact that Lansdale, the poet laureate of drive-ins, describes with accuracy and affection. Over a single eventful summer, Stanley learns about sex, cruelty, endemic racism, and the importance of family bonds. He also unearths a cache of documents pertaining to an unsolved 13-year-old murder case. Together with his sister, Callie, and an irascible, alcoholic projectionist named Buster Abbott Lighthorse Smith, he conducts an investigation of his own. Stanley's obsession with the murders of Margaret Wood, the daughter of a local prostitute, and Jewel Ann Stilwind, a member of Dewmont's leading family, forms the melodramatic center of the novel. But the real heart of this deeply engaging book is Stanley's gradually increasing awareness of the complex, often troubling nature of life in his new hometown. As he probes an unresolved crime, he finds himself in contact with a cast of characters who will alter and enlarge his understanding of the world. Among them are a battered young boy and his fanatical, sadistic father, a large-hearted black cook on the run from her abusive boyfriend, and a family of wealthy sexual predators -- the Stilwinds -- who wield money and influence like a club.

A Fine Dark Line is a touching, funny, effortlessly readable novel told in Lansdale's salty, unmistakable voice. It functions equally well as a novel of character, as a sharply observed evocation of the pre–civil rights South, and as an unconventional murder mystery. Like The Bottoms, it is both a memorable, authentic entertainment and an indelible portrait of a particular time and place. Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The time is the summer of 1958. The place is Dewmont, Texas, a town that the great American postwar boom has somehow passed by. A sad, hollow beat trails the kids who tune into rockabilly on the radio and waste their weekends at the Dairy Queen. And an undetected menace simmers under the heat that clings to the skin like thin molasses." "For blissfully ignorant thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchell, the end of innocence comes with his discovery of an old trove of passionate yet troubled love letters that lead him to a long-ago house fire and the tragic deaths of two very different young women. Obsessed with investigating their fates, Stanley finds a guide and mentor in black, elderly Buster Lighthouse Smith, a retired Indian Reservation policeman who now runs the projector at the drive-in theater owned by Stanley's parents. The laconic Buster tutors Stanley on the finer points of Sherlock Holmes, the blues, and life's lost dreams." But not every buried thing stays dead. And in one terrifying night of rushing creek water and thundering rain, an arcane, murderous force will suddenly rise from the past to threaten the boy - and test the limits of Buster's strength and wisdom. In the end the old man teaches Stanley a lesson that will haunt him always, about the forever short distance between living flesh and the dust from which it came.

SYNOPSIS

For young Stanley Mitchell, Jr., 1958 is quickly becoming a year of newfound joys and thrilling adventure. Beginning with the discovery of hidden love letters, and an uneasy meeting with Buster Lighthorse Smith, the Dewdrop Drive-in's elderly projectionist and former reservation policeman.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The atmosphere is as thick as an East Texas summer day in Edgar-winner Lansdale's (The Bottoms) engaging, multilayered regional mystery, which harks back to 1958. Thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchel, Jr., has enough on his hands just growing up in Dewmont, Tex., when he literally stumbles on a buried cache of love letters. Stanley pursues the identity of the two lovers with help from the projectionist at his family's drive-in, an aged black man who quotes Sherlock Holmes and doesn't mince words about the world's injustices. As the truth of a gruesome 20-year-old double murder comes to light in the sleepy town, so do the facts of life, death, men, women and race for young Stanley. Unfortunately, this wealth of experience sometimes strains credulity. For instance, Stanley, his sister, Callie, and friend Richard witness a secret burial, see a local phantom, are chased by a murderer and barely miss being hit by a train-all in one night. As the older and wiser Stanley says of the past, "More had happened to my family in one summer than had happened in my entire life." The "down-home" dialect is occasionally overdone, too, with more ripe sayings than Ross Perot on caffeine. But Lansdale clearly knows and loves his subject and enlivens his haunting coming-of-age tale with touches of folklore and humor. (Jan. 8)

AudioFile

If Mark Twain had written To Kill a Mockingbird or Summer of '42, it might sound something like Dick Hill's reading of A Fine Dark Line. Hill has the ear, the pitch, and the understanding to tell the story of 13-year-old Stanley Mitchell's all too fast coming-of-age in precisely the way author Joe Lansdale intended. In fact, Hill is the perfect match for Lansdale, who is no slouch when it comes to the oral storytelling tradition. Living in Dewmont, Texas, in 1958, where his parents own a drive-in theater, Stanley is completely ignorant of issues of sex, race, poverty, and violence. When he discovers a box of old love letters and journal entries near the ruins of a long-ago house fire, he unwittingly uncovers a forgotten scandal and several murders. S.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews