The year is 1955, and at a fishing camp on a lake straddling the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, a man is murdered. Written on the wall in dripping red are the words, Sins of the Father.
S.D. House, who is more popularly known as Silas House, is a writer from southeastern Kentucky who is well-known for his literary fiction and poetry about the Appalachian region. In 2023 he was named the Kentucky Poet Laureate, and his novels have received widespread critical acclaim and awards such as the Southern Book Critics’ Circle Prize and the Appalachian Writers’ Association Book of the Year Award. His novel Southernmost was long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It’s safe to say that House is one of the biggest names in Appalachian literary fiction, but in his newest novel, Dead Man Blues, he takes a sharp turn into a new genre—the murder mystery.
Dave Hendricks used to be a lot of things: a husband, the sheriff, the mayor, an esteemed citizen of the town of Shady Grove. But when his wife leaves him for his best friend, he drives his car into the county courthouse in a whiskey-fueled rage, and it all falls to pieces. Dave is content enough to settle on Cedar Lake with his houseboat and his dog, to live a more quiet life of bluegrass and blues records, of quiet mornings sipping hot coffee by the water. But when he hears a scream from across the lake and discovers the body of Esau Campbell, he is forced to work together with his estranged best friend, Sheriff Victor Burns, to get to the bottom of it.
On the surface, House has composed a thrilling historical mystery novel. His taste for the genre is clear in his execution of its conventions—the reader is presented with a flawed but likable detective, a cast of small town residents with grudges to hide and secrets to keep, and a double homicide rife with tantalizing crime scene details and shady witnesses.
Plus, Dave Hendricks is a compelling detective with nuance that only becomes clearer over time. Throughout the novel he grapples with grieving the loss of his wife and best friend after their affair, and he struggles with PTSD as a soldier who helped to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He dabbles in new romance and learns to question the norms of the 1950s American South. The thrill of unraveling the mystery brings him back to life, allowing the forward momentum of the novel to be driven both by the investigative puzzle and the emotional growth of Hendricks himself.
But beneath the waters of Cedar Lake exists another layer to Dead Man Blues, a sharp commentary on the history of land and loss in Appalachia. This is because the fictional Cedar Lake did not form naturally, but was a product of one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s hydroelectric dams. Beginning in the 1930s, the TVA constructed numerous hydroelectric dams throughout the Appalachian region with the goal of producing electricity, controlling floods, and creating recreational sites. However, to create these dams, over 100,000 people were displaced, especially in rural, vulnerable valleys.
This dislocation is a primary element of Dead Man Blues. There is a cemetery partially submerged and isolated in a small, island outcropping in the middle of Cedar Lake, which is rumored to be haunted by those whose bodies were never relocated after the rivers were dammed. There is the witness Dave interviews who grew up along the river, who looks out at the lake and describes the ghost of another landscape, the confluence of the rivers where there was once a waterfall with a breeze, where he and his wife and children once picnicked before the waters rose. There is the old woman who has to be carried away by the Corps of Engineers from the cabin where she was born.
But most importantly for the plot, there is the Campbell family, who knew about the TVA’s plan to create Cedar Lake, and used that knowledge to buy prime land cheaply before anyone else knew the value it would gain. Thanks to this corruption, when Esau Campbell is murdered, no one in the town seems particularly grieved, and the ominous phrase, sins of the father, begins to carry a damning implication.
Beyond the commentary on losing land to the TVA’s hydroelectric dam projects, it is the way that House weaves in the social and political context of 1950s Appalachia that lends this novel its power. The diverse cast of characters gives voice to many ways of life, and offers reflections on the historical construction of race, gender, and the nuclear family. Dave is challenged by his long-simmering attraction to Vashti Bryant, the town coroner, who holds the highest office of any black woman in the state. It’s not the attraction that bothers him—he’s pretty comfortable on that front—but the stark reality that Vashti presents to him: that due to segregation, they cannot eat at a restaurant together. There is also Dave’s other love interest, Nina Owens, a cunning reporter for The Shady Grove Sentinel who introduces Dave to the possibility of love and intimacy outside the confines of marriage.
Ultimately, Dead Man Blues marks a successful reinvention for S.D. House and a powerful entrance into the realm of the murder mystery. Both a page-turner and a glimpse into lesser-represented aspects of the Appalachian experience, this is a novel that enraptures from murderous start to satisfying finish.