Tim Gautreaux interview: Southern discomfort

Published on Friday 10 April 2009 16:54

WHEN a child is kidnapped in 1920s New Orleans, the devil is in the detail, Tim Gautreaux tells Claire Prentice

A CHILD snatched from a department store, a security guard haunted by his inability to prevent her disappearance. The themes of Tim Gautreaux's new novel, The Missing, couldn't be more contemporary, but little Lily Weller's abduction isn't covered wall to wall on CNN or emblazoned on the back of milk cartons. This is 1920s Louisiana, and Gautreaux's take on the chilling crime owes much more to old-fashioned moral doubts and certainties than it does to the modern apparatus of crime detection.

"If I'd set the book in the current time, it'd be just another crime drama and you can see that on TV any night of the week," says Gautreaux, at home in Hammond, Louisiana. Instead he uses the abduction of the child as the beginning of a meditation on guilt and personal responsibility.

The novel began life as a single paragraph police report in Gautreaux's local newspaper about a foiled kidnapping in a local discount store. The author was struck by what would have happened if the security guard had not prevented the crime.

"How would he feel?" says Gautreaux. "It depends on personality and values. If he were the type of person who'd go out and try to find the child then the whole narrative would be dictated by his character. It seemed like a good start for a novel."

In The Missing, Sam Simoneaux returns from the First World War and takes a job as a security guard in a New Orleans department store. When a child is kidnapped on his watch, he takes it upon himself to find the kidnapper and get the girl back, whatever the personal price. Leaving his wife behind, he takes a job on a dance boat which leads him on a dangerous journey up the Mississippi.

Like Gautreaux's earlier novel The Clearing and his short stories, The Missing is full of vivid evocations of the sights, sounds and smells of the South. As Simoneaux pursues his morally driven detective mission the scent of the steaming mud of the cypress swamps and the sound of 1920s New Orleans jazz rise off the page.

The plot is complex, and for Gautreaux, 62, a self-confessed history nut, historical accuracy was crucial. "There are many pieces in this book and they have to fit together correctly. If you get a single detail wrong, if I mention a song that wasn't published until a year later or get a geographical detail wrong, it completely spoils it for the reader," he says.

To ensure accuracy, he spent years poring over history books, technical manuals on machinery of the period and listened non-stop to the music of 1920s New Orleans.

As a Catholic writer from the south, Gautreaux is also interested in the moral issues behind the crime. He admits to being influenced by other Catholic southern writers, such as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. He was taught by Percy, whom he remembers saying that unless a narrative in some ways touches on a question of values then he didn't find it very interesting. "That stuck with me," Gautreaux says, adding that from O'Connor he learned that "you can deal with values without seeming preachy. And the way she mixes up humour and tragedy has been a big influence on me."

The question of values is filtered through Simoneaux, who stands out as a decent man in a novel populated by rednecks, wasters, cutthroats and desperadoes. While all around him carry out violent vendettas and take their bitterness to the grave, Simoneaux alone is able to rise above a desire for revenge despite being orphaned as a baby after his family was murdered.

He is a typical hero for Gautreaux who draws inspiration from his own blue collar background. Gautreaux's family worked on the boats that plied their trade up the Mississippi, the railroads, in the lumber companies and the oil rigs. "I wanted Sam to be ordinary. Anybody could be Sam," says the writer. "One of the most interesting things about a character is whether he is able to endure. Sam puts up with great hardship."

Until he retired five years ago, Gautreaux was a professor of literature at Southeastern University Louisiana. As a believer in the artistic value of the ordinary, every year he would take his students to Walmart because he regarded the bargain store as a fabulous source of stories.

Retirement has freed him to concentrate on his writing full time, but he still proceeds at a snail's pace: The Missing took him four years to complete. "I'd really like to accelerate the rate of my writing. I don't know if it's because I see the end of the tunnel."

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux is published by Sceptre, 11.99