Like many Americans, despite a nagging sense of better judgment and the guilt that follows from ignoring that judgment, I succumbed to unseen societal forces and purchased one of those new fangled televisions—which, of course, requires some kind of connection to the grid with its multitudinous and maddening choices. Occasionally, there is some (real) value to be squeezed out of an otherwise sordid medium. FX’s new series Justified is one such.

The reason begins with crime-story maestro Elmore Leonard’s involvement. The series is based on Raylon Givens, a character who has appeared in two Leonard novels—Riding the Rap and Pronto—and a novella, Fire in the Hole. Dutch Leonard (as he is also known) is listed as one of the show’s numerous executive producers, which in the filmmaking world could mean anything from an honorary mention to being the money man to being the reason the money was raised. In this case, it seems that Leonard is the muse who inspires the series’ writers—e.g., Graham Yost (also an executive producer)—for the first two episodes.

Which is to say the writing and the plot arc is wonderfully Leonard-esque. Raylon Givens, a Deputy U.S. Marshall in Miami, opens the proceedings, meeting Tommy, a thug he has given 24 hours to leave town (or he would kill him). With the ultimatum having only minutes before its expiration, the two have a vintage Leonard exchange. It’s a fascinating two or three minutes executed with nimble precision. Tommy gets his, and although by all the legal protocols, the shoot was justified, Givens is transferred to Kentucky, which is where he grew up. His first assignment is to bring to justice Boyd, a white supremacist he happened to have mined coal with in their youth. This is a rich vein of drama and humor as Boyd and his cohort are both lethal and goofy—in a manner that Leonard has mined successfully throughout his fiction.

If you are one of Leonard’s fans and jonesing for his latest work (and have exhausted his substantial oeuvre of over 40 novels), his new opus, Djibouti, is scheduled for an October release. The story is set in Djibouti (on the Horn of Africa) with Dana Barr, an accomplished documentary filmmaker intending to film the seagoing pirates who occasionally make it into the news cycle. Leonard’s publisher indicates a cast of misfits and oddballs, which make reading one of his stories great, good fun.

P.S. You may be aware of the drums beating for David Simon’s new dramatic series Treme, set in New Orleans (with George Pelecanos and Tom Piazza part of the writing team). Here is HBO’s most recent teaser/trailer. —Robert Birnbaum, Mar. 17, 2010

Tom Piazza, who has written well about New Orleans (his NOLA-based novel, City of Refuge, was the runner-up in last year’s Tournament of Books), is a member of the writing team for The Wire creator David Simon’s imminent HBO series, Treme, set in the Big Easy. (Anyone know why the city is called that?).

The drum is already beating as the April launch date approaches:

Piazza, a TV rookie whose 2005 book Why New Orleans Matters first got Simon’s attention, compares the series’ formation to building a novel chapter by chapter. “There are different kinds of story arcs,” he says. “Characters will have a big arc that takes them from the beginning of a novel to the end of a novel, or the beginning of a season to the end of a season; and characters also have smaller arcs that happen within chapters or within episodes. So basically the collaborative process (is) to discuss all of that — although, I think, [Simon] and [Overmyer] have probably the broadest view, and the most say, over the overall arc of the series. Then we each go and write an episode ourselves.”

We can’t hardly wait. Can you? —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 13, 2010

If there is a blacker mark of shame on the history of American governance (the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans notwithstanding), I am open to considering it. (Local so-called riots—Tulsa, Rosewood—don’t qualify as they did not have federal government complicity.) The fact that all of America witnessed the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the debacle of the aftermath seems not to have registered in the public consciousness. The recent anniversary reminds me that there are some useful, impressive books on the tragedy of New Orleans. In addition to Tom Piazza’s excellent novel City of Refuge (which we regularly tout here at TMN), Piazza in a matter of a few months published Why New Orleans Matters (Harper), a compelling broadside arguing for the irreplaceable import of New Orleans and worrying about emotional climate in the Crescent City: “That spirit is in terrible jeopardy right now. If it dies, something precious and profound will go out of the world forever.”

Cartoonist/illustrator Josh Neufeld chose to portray seven stories of multitudes in the pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina chaos in the graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon) and encapsulates the astonishing range of despair and glory that is to be found there. Neufeld observes:

The stories of the seven people in A.D. are quite particular and highly personal, but my hope is that they provide a window for readers who aren’t Katrina survivors into a world that few of us understand, but that we’ll be trying to make sense of for a long time to come. I also hope that readers will understand what it means that Denise, Leo, Michelle, Abbas, Darnell, Kwame, and Brobson are still rebuilding their lives and that the city they love has a long way to go, too.

Founder of QbaDisc records, music historian, and musician Ned Sublette—whose “Cowboy Rumba” is one of my favorite records (imagine a meringue version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky”)—was in New Orleans for Tulane University in 2004 and 2005, and as he writes, “We couldn’t know we were scrutinizing, day by day, the last year the city would be whole.” With The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans (Lawrence Hill), Sublette has created an aromatic bouillabaisse of history, personal testimony, memoir, analysis, and anecdote about what must be the most interesting city in the continental United States.

Amanda Boyden’s Babylon Rolling (Pantheon) is set in New Orleans in the pre-Katrina summer of 2004, and puts the five diverse voices of neighbors on an uptown street at play against each other (the Mays of Minnesota, the Guptas of India, the elderly Browns, a teenager recently off juvenile incarceration, and Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges). Of the novel author Kate Christensen opines:

Boyden has a chameleon-like ability to inhabit any persona, of any race or age, so fully and seamlessly it’s hard to remember that these people are invented rather than real. Pre-Katrina New Orleans leaps to life on every page, a beautiful, seamy, fragile city on the brink of chaos and ruin.

For his album The City That Care Forgot (429 Records), Mac Rebenak, aka Dr. John, adopts the name first coined in New Orleans city guide from the Federal Writers’ Project—though no explanation for that title exists—for his homage to his native city and the destruction and tragedy wrought by Katrina and parties known and unknown. Eric Clapton sits in. Audio here and here. The good doctor is angry and he is sad. Which is the way it is.

When Spike Lee went to New Orleans to film his documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, he encountered Phyllis Montana-Leblanc. He writes in the foreword to her book, Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story During and After Hurricane Katrina (Atria):

A documentary is only as good as its subjects For Levees we had an abundance of heroic and eloquent individuals—black, white Hispanic, male, female, young, old—who shared themselves with the world. As we made more trips down to New Orleans it became apparent to me that Phyllis had emerged as the dominant voice in the piece.

On our final trip we filmed Phyllis in her F.E.M.A. trailer where she gave me a big surprise. She asked if you could read on camera a poem she had written the night before. To be honest I have never been a fan of poetry and was not expecting much. But being cordial I said go ahead and read it. We rolled the camera and in painful and truthful words she summed up the entire four-hour documentary. Silently I thought, “Thank God. Now we have an ending.”

By the way, as Michael Grunwald wrote in the August 13, 2007, issue of Time, “The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster.” —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 24, 2009

Before you are deluged with the press release parroting of what I hope are well-meaning literary journalists rushing to present you with the lists of forthcoming books for the fall season (as if you have come close to reading much of the last season’s list), let me offer a list of my own creation. Though it must be said—and I will say it—that book lists seem to me to only be useful for course or seminar preparation. Don’t you think?

A familiar aria amongst us reader/writer types is the anguished hand-wringing that accompanies intoning the cruelty and myopia of the rest of the barbarous world in failing to recognize the brilliance of that which we (meaning I) deem to be genius. I am not immune to such pedestrian foibles—and so, here’s my list of wonders. The only thing that they have in common (besides me) is that they were all read in this century.

The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux: Louisiana native Gautreaux throws all of best things (you know what they are) into this period piece set in a timber/lumber mill camp circa the mid ’20s—naturally, in west Louisiana.

One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash: South Carolinian poet Rash gives a taste of America around the Korean War with characters who are much more than mannequins to accessorize what is ostensibly a murder mystery. Or is it?

Night Talk by Elizabeth Cox: Two childhood friends of different races set in 1950s Georgia is a rich hook upon which to hang a narrative; if Cox had balanced the changes taking place in the world at large (i.e., the Civil Rights movement), this story would be close to perfect. As it is, it’s pretty good.

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow: This is a grand, sweeping, narco-political novel that is jam-packed with everything you could want in a so-called thriller: intrigue, violence, Machiavellian plotting, admirable and not so characters—sketching out very plausible (scarily so) connections between drug cartels, governments, terrorists, the Church (including the Vatican), and various drug law enforcement agencies. This should be made into a HBO miniseries, stat.

Night of the Jaguar, Tropic of Night, and Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber: Gruber’s trilogy of novels about Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American homicide detective in Miami, is so compelling that I overcame my series resistance in order to read the first two, and even found the third of interest. Gruber is smart and funny and imbues Paz with rich depth—you’ll want to keep your eye on him, looking out for his next move.

A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr: Kerr was celebrated early in his career as one of those Granta-anointed young writers, and has written a broad horizon of novels including his well-known Berlin Noir Trilogy. This 1993 novel is set in near-future London and has Chief Inspector Isadora “Jake” Jakowicz investigating a serial murderer (code-named Wittgenstein) and the computer designation of certain people as criminally dangerous.

God’s Country by Percival Everett: Everett has written 17 novels and nary a clinker in the lot—if he has a well-known book, it is probably Erasure, his send-up of America’s endless racial foibles, set in book publishing and academia. I prefer his earlier work, which joins McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Little Big Man and, most recently, Deadwood, as a entertaining demythologizing of the Old West.

The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus: It is 1999 and nearly destitute photographer Ned Giles, 84 years old, sells his only copy of La Niña Bronca for the handsome amount of 30 grand. It’s a photo he took in 1932 of a Apache girl—the same girl after which this book is entitled. The book flashes back to that year and Giles’s account of the Great Apache Expedition, mounted in the badlands of the Sierre Madres to retrieve the son of a Mexican rancher kidnapped by the Apaches.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson: To recap—set in 1903, the book follows young Mary Bolton as she flees her dead husband’s sadistic twin brothers, who are seeking to avenge the murder of their sibling. Bolton’s flight takes her into the snowbound Canadian Rockies of Alberta, where she recounts the details that led her to her homicidal act.

The Criminalist by Eugene Izzi: Chicago crime story writer Izzi was found hanging outside his office window in 1996, having written 13 books (two published as Nick Gaitano). As Raymond Chandler and Michael Connelly are to Southern California, George Pelecanos to D.C. and George V. Higgins to Boston, Izzi was the dark laureate of Chi-town. All his novels, as the sports guys intone, “get it done,” but I am partial to this one.

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt: Hustvedt’s story of the friendship of two men over 25 years is abruptly and shockingly transformed by a “sudden and incapacitating tragedy.” It’s a stunning narrative in more ways than one.

Redemption Falls by Joseph O’Connor: This is a rip-roaring tale set in Civil War-era Montana Territory, and O’Connor uses all manner of texts—ballads, letters, songs, memoirs, and reports from spies—to shape a full-bodied narrative.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza: Piazza looks at New Orleans during the Katrina deluge and after through the lens of a white Midwestern transplant family and a black lifelong resident. It’s a moving and evocative story of an unresolved black mark on America’s heritage, not to mention a Tournament of Books finalist.

Bullet Heart by Michael Doane: Doane, who published a number of decent novels in the late ’80s and ’90s, seems to have slipped off the face of the Earth. In this one he uses a true event, the construction of a golf course on Lakota burial grounds in South Dakota, and the dispossession of the bones of Sioux Indian girl to form a taut and dark thriller.

The Darkest Jungle: The True Story of the Darien Expedition and America’s Ill-Fated Race to Connect the Seas by Todd Balf: Earlier this year, David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon deservedly occupied the (narrowing) vision of the book-reviewing community—which reminded me that the best exploration adventure story I have read to date is Balf’s account of an 1854 U.S. Naval expedition commanded by 33-year-old Isaac Strain (a truly fascinating character in his own right). What was supposed to be a ten-day jaunt across the Isthmus of Panama turned into a deadly disaster in the treacherous terrain that is known as the Darien Gap.

I Should Be Extremely Happy to Be in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark by Brian Hall: It’s an unwieldy title, but Brian Hall’s account of the two legendary explorers (and their Indian guide Sacagawea) has all the verisimilitude and plausibility of a historical account of the greatest exploration of the American continent.

Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown: Inness-Brown’s first (and so far only) novel is set on a sparse, beautiful New England island, and focuses on the relationship between James Jack, orphaned at an early age, and the 94-year-old title character, Marguerite Anne Bernadette-Marie Deo, who took him in. The story bounces to New Orleans to give us Marguerite’s back story. In 200 pages or so, it is a big story, well presented. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 11, 2009

This time around—it being an election year and all—a hurricane’s landfall stole the G.O.P.’s most recent thunder. This time, the threat of another deadly disaster got through to our lame-duck president and the major networks. And obviously New Orleans and the Gulf Coast offer greater visuals than do endless pans over excited, conventioneering Republicans in Minnesota.

Accomplished writer Tom Piazza (My Cold War and Why New Orleans Matters) has penned an illuminating novel, City of Refuge, that vividly describes the few days before and after Hurricane Katrina wrought mayhem on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Using two characters—Craig, a transplanted Midwestern writer, and S.J., a Vietnam veteran deeply rooted in the city of his birth—Piazza not only shows the criminal failure, indifference, and negligence of a long list of agencies and officials, but conjures the horrific and deadly conditions faced by the people of New Orleans during and after Katrina’s havoc. Large-hearted novelist Richard Russo blurbs:

To read City of Refuge is to realize that this is what fiction is for: to take us to places the cameras can’t go. The novel’s characters—and what happens to them—are unforgettable, and so is the portrait of New Orleans, the city Tom Piazza clearly loves with all his large, generous heart.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 5, 2008