Crossroad Blues: A Nick Travers Mystery - Hardcover

Atkins, Ace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312192541 ISBN 13: 9780312192549

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1998

Synopsis

The disappearance of a college professor investigating rumors of previously unknown recordings by renowned blues musician Robert Johnson, murdered more than fifty years earlier, leads football player-turned-blues historian Nick Travers along a dangerous trail as he seeks to unravel the dark truths behind an old mystery.

About this title

About the Author

Ace Atkins is a staff writer for the Tampa Tribune.

Reviews

The legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson has been used for fictional purposes before (e.g., in Walter Mosley's RL's Dream), but Florida journalist Atkins takes full, fresh advantage of Johnson's life, music and strange death in his first mystery. Despite the weight of two overused genre staples (the New Orleans setting and an ex-sports star as hero), this lively debut sparks hope for an ongoing series. It wasn't an injury that turned Nick Travers, who played for the New Orleans Saints, into a part-time detective and full-time expert on the blues. "Nick had been thrown out of the NFL for kicking his coach's ass during a Monday Night Football game," the third-person narrator tell us. Now he teaches the occasional blues history class at Tulane, works on his biography of Guitar Slim and plays his harmonica at JoJo's Blues Bar?a place so deftly described that it should be real even if it isn't. When a Tulane colleague disappears on a quest for a hitherto unknown Johnson recording in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood, Travers goes to look for him?and walks into a murderous mess of colorful sociopaths. Among them are a deadly teenage Elvis lookalike and a slimy record producer who not only orchestrates violent crimes but, worse, dares to use the blues as a marketing ploy. This tale's a pleasure for both mystery and RL fans.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A first novel introducing ex-football star Nick Travers of New Orleans. Now a blues historian writing a bio of Guitar Slim, Nick spends his days and nights teaching blues history part-time at Tulane University, playing jazz harp at JoJos Blues Bar at the edge of the French Quarter, and missing a recently departed girlfriend. Then comes a call from Randy Sexton, head of Tulanes Jazz and Blues Archives, asking for help. Michael Baker, professor of music history, has disappeared in the Greenwood area of the Mississippi Delta while tracking Robert Johnson, a jazz legend who vanished in the late 1930s. Nick heads for Greenwood and begins a long, violence-packed search, encountering characters like young, stupid Jesse Garon (a psychopathic killer who worships Elvis), Delta policeman Willie Brown (soon to die), ruthless record producer and blues-club owner Pascal Cruz, his hit man Sweet Boy Floyd, and Crackeran aged albino who holds the key to Johnsons death and to the priceless, never-heard recordings he left behind. On the plus side theres red-headed jazz guitarist Virginia Dare, but Nick is one tired dude by the time its all over. The plotting is endlessly confusing, and the narration heavily laden with raw language and raw sex. But the authors energy, talent, and deep love of music will leave many readers looking forward to Atkinss next outing. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

First novelist Atkins has combined several recurring themes in the mystery genre (see the Read-alike column on the opposite page), but he's stirred them in his own special way, producing one of the year's most promising new series. Nick Travers, former New Orleans Saints defensive back turned harmonica player and blues historian, takes to the road to track down a colleague who has disappeared, on the trail of nine unknown recordings by blues giant Robert Johnson. Using as a kind of narrative backbeat the oft-repeated legend of Johnson's life and death (he purportedly met the devil at a Mississippi crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for superhuman mastery of the blues guitar), Atkins sends Nick deep into the mysterious Delta country, where old-timers are reluctant to talk about Johnson's death: Was it murder, or was Satan simply calling in his marker? As the mystery unravels--the recordings are coveted by an unscrupulous impresario who hopes to exploit the Johnson myth to promote his ersatz blues club in New Orleans--Nick is torn by his own historian's fervor to unravel Johnson's past and his desire to protect the sanctity of the blues from media overkill. Throw in some snappy dialogue, a steamy romance with a red-haired blues singer, and the superbly evoked Delta landscape, and you have a meaty, straight-ahead mystery, entertaining from first to last. Like the blues, this one sticks to formula but draws a depth of feeling from the familiar notes. Bill Ott

New Orleans blues historian Nick Travers delves into the 50-year-old Mississippi murder of celebrated blues musician Robert Johnson when a college professor investigating unknown Johnson recordings disappears. Atkins's promising debut mystery series combines blues history, a gutsy protagonist, and authentic Southern settings.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312192541
• ISBN 13: 9780312192549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 226