Sunset and Sawdust

by Joe R.Lansdale

Review by James R.Cain

'Sunset and Sawdust' is the story of Sunset Jones, the beautiful but brutalised wife of Pete Jones, the constable of the sawmill town of Camp Rapture.  Camp Rapture is a small East Texas community, and times are hard because of the Depression.  

The book commences when Sunset shoots her husband in self defence as he's beating her and trying to rape her.  One thing leads to another, and with the support of her understanding mother-in-law, the controlling owner of the sawmill, Sunset is elected to her dead husband's job.  

But things are not easy for a female constable in this male-dominated era, especially when she begins investigating a crime that's been seemingly overlooked by her husband: the murder of a baby whose oil-soaked body was found on a black man's land.  Then a second body turns up: the body of a white woman and suspicions begin turning Sunset's way.

'Sunset and Sawdust' is a great mystery.  Lansdale captures the essence of this bigoted community in East Texas.  Sunset must find strengths within herself to not only rebuild her life with her daughter, but combat racial and sexual prejudice and do her job.  It's an age when the law allows a mob to lynch and burn a black man in their custody, and when the Klan's word goes unopposed.  If Sunset doesn't find the killer, she could quite well end up dead .

The characterisation in 'Sunset and Sawdust' is Lansdale at his finest.  The book's funny, sad and tragic at times.  At other moment's it's poignant or vicious.  As a Lansdale fan, I enjoyed this book more than 'A Fine Dark Line' and 'The Bottoms' and it is a work in a like vein, set in the same era and examining similar themes.  Recommended.

Publisher: Alfred A.Knopf

ISBN: 0-375-41453-3 - Hardcover (321 pages)