On William Faulkner's "Knight's Gambit"

Last week I learned that William Faulkner wrote a collection of six short crime mysteries that all feature his own Southern Gothic version of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot—a "Gavin Stevens" who serves as the prosecuting attorney for the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County outside of Jefferson, Mississippi—and, so far, the stories are decent!

Now, there's nothing groundbreaking here, and the "solutions" to these capers are largely uninteresting, but we're not here because we like mystery novels, we're here because we want to witness a master's hand conduct another genre, like watching Terrence Malick direct a heist film.

Predictably, Faulkner takes about one page before doing his thing. In "Smoke," a nameless narrator freely imagines what happened between two brothers and presents his own imagined story as truth (much like Quentin in "Absalom, Absalom"), and in "Monk," Faulkner again centers events around a mentally disabled, captivating young man (like Benjy in "The Sound and the Fury"). Importantly, it's all just a fucking tear to read. If I was asked what kind of character Gavin Stevens would be before reading any Gavin Stevens yarns, I'd think, "Well, he's probably a well-educated, blue-collar pontificator" and hot dog isn't he just that! It's also a delight to see Faulkner reuse names (two characters named "Anse" appear here, though neither is "Anse" from "As I Lay Dying") and to find endless opportunities to criticize our entire doomed race.

I will always buy what Faulkner is selling because I think he offers one of the strongest and most prescient analyses of "White-ness" in America—there is guilt intertwined into birth for things that you, personally, played no part in, and yet which you, by mature obligation, must bear—and seeing it in these little crime stories is cool.