Sun, Sand, and Sin: A Dive into Gulf Coast Noir

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There’s just something about the Gulf Coast region that invites gritty crime stories.

From Dennis Lehane’s Joe Coughlin stories to the work of Carl Hiaasen to Nic Pizzolatto’s Galveston (not to mention the absorbing first season of Pizzolatto’s True Detective), there are many popular examples of hardboiled and noir stories in particular that revel in griminess of the Gulf’s swampy settings and rotten milieus.

As someone who grew up on the Gulf, I can understand how the region became so strongly linked with the bleakness of noir. My hometown was a grim, two-faced place: if you wandered a few blocks past the short stretch of road along the waterfront that sold driftwood carvings and seashell tchotchkes for tourists, you’d find a lot of impoverished clusters of homes, still scarred from whatever storm last swept through, probably plastered with signs about the second amendment as a threat to potential trespassers.

I haven’t been back to my hometown since Hurricane Harvey made landfall there in 2017, so I’m not sure what you’d find now. In my imagination, it still lies in broken shambles, the scattered pieces I saw in the news coverage days after the storm.

That’s one of the things Gulf Coast noir stories capture best: the extreme vulnerability of the region to the whims of nature. In particular, noir novels set in the Gulf tend to focus on the way hurricanes can rewrite a community’s history, shape a place’s identity in the aftermath of trauma, and even seem to stop time entirely.

In Hell or High Water, Joy Castro’s 2012 crime novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans, protagonist Nola Céspedes is a young reporter desperate to leave the city, her hometown. “The plan,” she tells the reader, “is to write a few knockout features, get noticed, pack my bags, and then take my clips to some real newspaper in some real city” (42).

Those last words emphasize one of Nola’s major complaints about New Orleans: its artificiality, the gaudy pageantry that hides the poverty underneath. In that way, at least, there is something honest and revealing in the storm. After Katrina, the popular images of New Orleans finally change from the images “of Mardi Gras, of feathered masks and dancing down the streets” that had once falsely lured Nola’s mother from Miami (21). Now, according to Nola, the new face of New Orleans is “[t]he Lower Ninth—the wasteland you see on TV . . . a hot, sad, barren mess” (170)—much closer to Nola’s own experiences growing up in project housing.

Of course, even this picture falls into a dualistic trap, one that benefits the people with the power to choose whether they would rather exploit New Orleans or condemn it. The divide between the experience of the people who live there and people who experience the place as tourists bears much more insidious consequences than mere aesthetics: the serial killer at the heart of Hell or High Water only receives serious press coverage and police investigation when he chooses a pretty white tourist as his third victim.

When such a divided community experiences a cataclysmic event like a hurricane, it is always telling to see who ends up being the most vulnerable; the tentative harmonies that can exist between the haves and have-nots end up being exposed for all their imbalance.

Other recent Gulf-set novels—such as Melissa Ginsburg’s The House Uptown and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, which takes place in rural southern Mississippi—also examine Katrina’s effect on the region. In The House Uptown, Ginsburg depicts Katrina as an all-encompassing experience, one profound enough for near-wordless reference to deflate conflict between strangers, reminding them of their shared trauma. The experience of Katrina and its aftermath seems to shape future experiences of trauma, as well, such as when, in the wake of a violent crime, one character finds himself “back in Katrina time, a numbed-out, slowed-down hellscape where nothing made sense” (233).

Interestingly, Salvage the Bones is framed, not in the devastating aftermath of Katrina, but in the build-up to it. As narrator Esch’s family prepares their property for the storm, Ward builds a sharp tension that lets her reader understand there is no preparation which will keep them safe from the violence that is awaiting them, in the form of wailing winds and rising waters. In this way, these novels use classic man vs. nature conflict as a thematic parallel to the man vs. man conflicts they contain–the crimes against both natural and human laws that the characters inflict upon one another.

Water is often a site of violence and its discovery in Gulf-set crime novels, as in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season; the novel’s inciting incident comes when the murdered body of a local witch washes up in a canal in a small Mexican community, the seed of a story that will bring many hidden violences to light. The same water that shapes these communities’ geographies and economies also ends up revealing their darkest truths. Other sites of discovery are similarly revealing of the primary tensions within the settings’ histories, as in Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season, where the murdered woman is discovered on the grounds of an old plantation house that has been turned into a popular tourist attraction: clearly, the violences of history refuse to be fully sanitized and suppressed.

In the U.S., after all, the Gulf is also the South, and Gulf noir often blurs with Southern Gothic as a result, as with Jesmyn’s Ward’s later novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, in which the afterlives of violence (both criminal and state-sanctioned) live on as literal ghosts, appearing in and—in the case of ghost-narrator Richie–commenting on the devolving noir-style trajectories of the living cast.

My novel, The Gulf, also blends elements of noir and the Gothic. When the eccentric, aging Miss Kate buys up Parson House–the crumbling old mansion that had been built long ago by the founding family of Parson, Texas–nobody in town knows what her plans are, or how she could afford the property. Even Louisa “Lou” Ward, whom Miss Kate hired to help her fix up the place, has no idea.

After Miss Kate’s violent, unexplained death in the Parson House garden, the police seem all too eager to call it an accident. But Lou feels great affection for Miss Kate, who was a sort of mother to her when Lou was abandoned by her own mother as a child. She can’t help but suspect something darker is going on.

That’s when the hurricane comes. Anyone with any sense, including most of Lou’s family, flees inland, watches, and waits. When the waters finally recede, there isn’t much of Parson left to  rebuild. Lou, though, can’t bring herself to leave… not when she has so many unresolved questions about what happened to Miss Kate. She is especially suspicious when Joanna—Miss Kate’s estranged daughter and Lou’s first love-turned-enemy—returns to town, looking to make a profit on Parson House and leave as quickly as she can.

Lou, who’s held an obsessive grudge against Joanna for years, starts to dig around, asking questions that stir up old dirt. The ghosts of Parson mingle with the suffering of the living as Lou tries to unravel the truth about what happened to Miss Kate… truth that threatens to reveal many more secrets about Parson, Joanna, Miss Kate, and even about Lou herself.

The Gulf is part of a rich tradition of novels set in the Gulf region: a region that can never disentangle itself from the consequences of its vicious past, and one in which the destructive force of nature serves to expose its communities’ darkest sins.

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