Rather than his father's tall, pitcher's physique and blond curls and dark skin and green eyes, Larry got Uncle Colin and his mother's olive skin and straight, brown hair and brown eyes with long lashes - which attractive on women, made Larry and Uncle Colin soft and feminine, seatbelt users who ate tilapia. What did you say? Your little what? Uncle Colin tried to explain that he hadn't just referred to his sexual organ, but Carl had had enough and left the table.ĭoppelganger, he said, glancing at Larry. Larry saw Carl was sawing at his venison. Y'all look just alike, Larry's mother said at dinner on Uncle Colin's last night, looking from her brother to her son.

FRANKLIN: (Reading) Larry had become an expert at reading his father's disapproval - sidelong looks, his low size, how he'd shut his eyes and shake his head at the idiocy of something or someone. And I wonder if you could read a description of Larry and his father, Carl. The thing about Larry is that he had been an object of ridicule long before that first and only date.

And no body was ever found Larry never confessed but he's been ostracized and ridiculed forever.

The locals call him Scary Larry because when he was in high school, he took a girl on a date, and she was never heard from again. ROBERTS: So one of the main characters is a white guy named Larry Ott. And so, you know, I put an epigraph in the front of the book explaining it, you know, because what I've discovered is that a lot of people don't know what it means. If people know what that means, they grew up in the South. So, I was actually was writing the book set in Alabama, and because of the title, I just slid it all west into Mississippi. And as some point I thought, I don't know, that title occurred to me, 'Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.' I thought it was strange no one's ever used that before because it's so prevalent in the South. FRANKLIN: You know, what happened was, I was trying to write this novel and it was not going well at all. ROBERTS: So, which came first: the title or the setting? FRANKLIN: It's how Southern children are taught to spell Mississippi - M-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-crooked letter-crooked letter-I-humpback-humpback-I. ROBERTS: So, what does crooked letter, crooked letter mean? TOM FRANKLIN (Author, 'Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter'): Thanks, Rebecca. Tom Franklin joins me now from the studios of member station WKNO in Memphis, Tennessee. The novel is part crime drama, part coming-of-age story, and part portrait of a small town largely left behind by the 21st century. The title of Tom Franklin's new book is 'Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.' And if you know what that means, then you can also probably imagine the Deep South small town, the legacy of racism, and the economic despair that shape Franklin's characters.

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