A redneck in Blue Eye

STEPHEN HUNTER'S Black Light the light that exposes a sniper's target in the dead of night is the third in a loose trilogy of novels, the first two volumes being Point of Impact and Dirty White Boys. Set in the dust bow areas of middle America, they exhibit a good ol' boy, redneck toughness and a philosophy based on plain speaking, Old Testament fire and brimstone and the rule of violence as a means of settling feuds and disagreements.

We've already met the protagonist of Black Light he is Bob Swagger, a marine hero of Vietnam, who, in more recent times, was sucked into doing undercover work and came out of it a crippled and embittered man. Now living in Arizona with his wife and young daughter and working at taming wild horses, he is approached by a young man named Russell Pewtie who asks for his help in writing a book about Earl Swagger, Bob's father.

Earl was also a hero of his time, the second World War, and when he came home from it to rural Arkansas, he joined the state troopers. In 1955, while investigating the death of a 15 year old black girl, he was apparently gunned down by two young robbers one Jimmy Pye and his cousin, Bub.

Russell Pewtie now hints that he may have evidence to disprove this simplistic solution to the older Swagger's death, and that, allied with the fact that Pewtie's own father, Bud, was also, at a later time, involved with the Pye family, stirs Bob's curiosity to the point where he albeit reluctantly decides to throw in his lot with the younger man and journey to Blue Eye in Arkansas to roust out a few sleeping dogs.

And, of course, all hell breaks loose, for the book then becomes another version of the film Bad Day at Blackrock, with most of the town fathers implicated in the ancient cover up and in no way anxious to have it dug up once again. Chief among the plotters are the US Senator Hollis Etheridge, scion of a prominent local political family with aspirations to the presidency, and the avuncular crime boss, Red Bama.

Running in tandem with the present day time scale is the odyssey of Earl Swagger himself, with the consequence that we see the story unfolding on two levels. I wasn't too sure how this would work at first, but Stephen Hunter brings it off well, helped by the fact that old ways and traditions move like the mills of God slow, slow and slower still in that particular section of America.

This authenticity of patterns of behaviour lends gravitas to the narrative, with elemental forces at work that must grind to their inevitable conclusion. We get something of the same inexorable majesty of pace and fated consummation in the work of writers like Pete Dexter, Thomas Eidson and Cormac McCarthy, or in films such as Jim Jarmusch's, latest, Dead Alan, where nemesis is as predestined as night following day.

Hunter is at home in, and understands, his milieu and he makes his characters larger than life so that they can stand silhouetted against their background. Perhaps this leads to a certain starkness of definition, i.e., all bad or all good, but in this type of novel maybe this starkness of design is a necessity. After all, right from the beginning if we're to believe these things Cain and Abel were sides of the double edged coin good and evil. And the book they featured in has been the all time bestseller. Mr Hunter, no doubt, would be highly pleased to have it so good.