Ozark Noir at Its Finest | A Conversation with Eli Cranor

By Peg Cannon

Eli Cranor is a young Arkansan writer of crime fiction who’s making headlines. His debut, Don’t Know Tough (Soho Press, 2022), was quickly identified as a must-read thriller. In addition to receiving the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the book has won a slew of laurels and other awards. Set in Denton, Arkansas, in the world of high school football, Don’t Know Tough demonstrates how completely Eli understands the challenges his characters face and the disparate (and sometimes difficult) backgrounds they come from. He also understands that life’s choices can be complicated and relative.

His second noir, Ozark Dogs (Soho Press, 2023), is set north of Denton in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, where the underbrush and accents are as thick as the gut-retching evil that percolates within some of his characters. One is so onerous Eli names him Evail. The gritty fictional town of Taggard has been left desolate after the shuttering of the area’s single employer, the nuclear power plant. Without the hope of gainful employment, despair clouds every sunrise. Evail reads the mood and declares, “Desperation is a quality we can exploit.” With crystal meth as currency, he plots with a Mexican cartel to kidnap and trade “pretty white girls with hollow-eyed mommas. Mommas who never called the police.”

The supporting elements are pure Southern: football, dogs, guns, hunting, religion, family. The Gothic emerges in the form of murder, incest, kidnapping, white supremacy, and the latest monster, methamphetamines. The novel pits two warring families—one hunting retribution to avenge a son’s murder, the other clumsily protecting its innocent from the hunters—against each other. Each faction ignores all laws of man or God to achieve its goal. This is Ozark noir at its finest and further evidence of Eli’s deep knowledge of this part of the country.

Eli was nice enough to take time out of his busy schedule to talk about Ozark Dogs. Our conversation took place over email.

Peg Cannon: The inspiration for Ozark Dogs came from a murder that took place several years before the book was published. During the interim, you expanded the event into a riveting tale populated by a strong bench of characters. So let’s talk about your writing process. You began with the kernel for a story. As you were developing your storyline, at what point did you begin to create the characters? Or did the two elements develop together and feed off each other?

Eli Cranor: Every book, for me, is different. What I mean is that there’s no formula for writing a novel. No rules or guide. Ozark Dogs is the only book I’ve ever outlined. That outline helped keep all the characters straight, but it resulted in a first draft that tusked in at little over 100,000 words. When my brilliant editor, Juliet Grames, finally got hold of it, we ended up chopping it down to its current state, which is just a hair over 60,000 words.

PC: Your lead character, Jeremiah Fitzjurls, is especially interesting. He is a complex guy: a decorated Vietnam War sharpshooter who’s consumed with guilt over his kills. (His fellow soldiers nicknamed him “The Judge.”) Can you explain Jeremiah’s role in your story and how he evolved?

EC: I guess you could say Jeremiah is the hero of this book. One thing I try to do is make sure my good guys are a little bad and my bad guys a little good. In other words, I try to make them real. I don’t know many Vietnam vets. The ones I do know, I don’t know well enough to interview. Anything I got right with Jeremiah I owe to Kentucky author Alex Taylor. Alex read an early draft of this book and told me he felt like Jeremiah was a cardboard cut-out. That stung at first, but when I went back and looked at the book, Alex was right. Not only did Alex point out my protagonist’s flaw, but he also helped me solve it by sharing invaluable information about the Vietnam vets he knew personally. Alex is a great guy and one hell of a writer. I rank his short story collection The Name of the Nearest River right up there with Flannery O’Connor’s and Breece “D’J” Pancake’s work.

PC: Jeremiah owns a junkyard, and it seems the two are extensions of each other. Can you talk a bit about the relationship between character and setting?

EC: At the start of the novel, there’s a lot we don’t know about Jeremiah. He’s still carrying scars from the war, from his past. I think junkyards are like that. What you see on the outside is only half the story.

PC: After inheriting the responsibility of rearing his now eighteen-year-old granddaughter, Joanna, Jeremiah serves as mother, father, and protector from the Ledford family. He takes the role seriously, turning his junkyard into a bunker fortified by a pack of dogs he feeds only once a week because “there is nothing more vicious than a hungry dog.” He trains Joanna to keep her gun in the nightstand drawer with the safety on and “one in the chamber.” Can you talk to us about their relationship and the gifts they give each other?

EC: I have a six-year-old daughter. Six going on sixteen. Both my grandpas were dead before I turned full-on teenager. I was really close to my mom’s dad, Poppy. He taught me how to tackle, how to wheel and deal. I miss him still. I would’ve loved for him to meet my daughter. I think that’s where those characters came from. In regard to what they give each other: love and heartache, equal doses of both.

PC: Taggard is located in the Arkansas Ozarks. But it could be any of the hundreds of small, isolated towns across the United States whose factories have been shuttered. How important is Taggard’s bleakness to your story?

EC: Desperation is important. I’m a big fan of Mississippi author Larry Brown. Larry used to say he liked to give his characters “trouble on the first page.” There are a lot of ways to get in trouble in small towns. Once a character is in trouble, desperation comes into play. The fewer options, the better.

PC: The dominant physical feature of your hometown of Russellville is the 447-foot cooling tower of the Arkansas Nuclear One power plant. In Ozark Dogs, the shuttered power plant is the source of Taggard’s development and collapse. Its vacant cooling tower plays an important role in the book’s tense finale. Can you talk about the decision to include the plant as a backdrop in the novel?

EC: I live on the banks of Lake Dardanelle, right in the heart of True Grit country. Nuclear One’s cooling tower is about a half-mile to the west of my back deck. Luckily, it’s mostly out of eyesight, but it’s always there, looming in the background. I don’t know what kind of thought went into making that tower what it is for this book, other than the fact that Jeremiah was a sniper and that seemed like a cool spot for a shootout.

PC: Another intriguing element in the novel is your inclusion of prison letters. The tenderness of one struck me, when Jeremiah’s granddaughter, Jo, writes “when I came over a little rise in the road and saw this momma cow standing over a newborn calf. I pulled over and watched her lick that little calf’s withers. Lick the ears and nose. She’d even bend down and nuzzle its tiny body with her head. Kinda gave it a shove and make it move some. But that calf weren’t moving. And that momma knew it.” What inspired those letters? What purpose do they serve in the novel?

EC: I teach English to kids in juvenile correctional facilities all across Arkansas. That’s my day job. Before that, I went with a group to play music for inmates serving life sentences in Cummins [The Cummins Unit, a prison farm in the Arkansas Delta]. Through those experiences, I learned a little bit about prison letters. I saw the marked-out words, the creases in the paper, how many times they’d been folded and unfolded, read and re-read. That letter about the stillborn calf came from a story my father told me one day with tears in his eyes.

In the novel, the letters are a close look into Jo’s personal life: her inner thoughts and feelings. They’re written in first-person, of course, while the rest of the book is in third. I just thought it was a nice way to switch up the pacing, to pause before each act. The letters also contain their very own mystery, something to do with the inmate number. It’s been fun hearing from the readers who’ve figured it out.

PC: Another familiar setting for you is the football field. Before you became a writer, you spent a decade playing college and professional football, ending your career as a high school coach. Writing and coaching are very different, but you’ve successfully intermingled your experiences. Football seems to have found its place in both of your books. How did you land on the combination of football and crime fiction?

EC: It took a while, I’ll say that. I wrote three failed manuscripts before Don’t Know Tough. If I’m lucky, those three books will never see the light of day. It wasn’t until I started writing about football that anybody started reading my stuff. There’s that old adage, “Write what you know.” I don’t think that’s completely true, but there’s some truth to it, especially for a debut novel. Writing from experience is tricky. It’s harder in some ways, easier in others. But when a young author really bleeds onto the page, readers can feel it. And most of the time, that’s what it takes to break through.

PC: I must admit to being very claustrophobic, but somewhere between the kidnapping, the feed sack, and the root cellar, I shut the book and took a step back. (Only temporarily, of course.) How much pleasure do you take in terrorizing your readers?

EC: Writing and reading are two different things. I have to remember that. Same, I figure, as making a scary movie. You’re not really thinking about the blood and guts when you’re smearing them around on a set. It’s all sugar water and plastic then. It’s all fake. But for the audience, that blood is real as real gets. The same is true of writing. An author has to be aware of the shock they’re putting into each page. A reader can only handle so much.

PC: You’re the enviable writer who’s developed a support group of talented writers and early readers, including your mom. How important are your book friends to your writing? At what stage of the writing process do you begin sharing?

EC: A quarterback/coach turned writer doesn’t start with many literary friends. At least I didn’t. I’ve gone about hunting these people up over the years. I hold them dear. I rely on their opinions for all sorts of stuff, from business to books. I have about three early readers I still send stuff to at this point. I’ve whittled that list down. You don’t want too many fingerprints on a manuscript. I send it to them after I’ve taken a story as far as I can take it on my own.

PC: Are there any crime novelists whose work you follow or take inspiration from?

EC: I cut my teeth on Southern writers like Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Flannery O’Connor, and Jesmyn Ward. Once my books got labeled “crime novels,” I figured I better do my homework. I found Elmore Leonard and fell for him hard. Nobody writes a cleaner sentence than Dutch. Some current crime writers I admire are S.A. Cosby, Michael Koryta, Danya Kukafka, Megan Abbott, Jordan Harper, and James Kestrel.

PC: I also want to say congratulations. You must be proud to have received the exceptional honor of being named an Edgar winner. How did that feel?

EC: I had absolutely zero expectations going in. I was just thrilled to be nominated and excited to take a trip to New York. My wife went with me. Neither one of us had been before. I’m crazy superstitious. I think it comes from my football days. I didn’t write a speech. The thought was if I put pen to paper, I’d jinx what little chance I had. So, when they called my name, I stumbled up to the stage and told everybody I was literally “speechless.” I still am.

Peg Cannon lives in Monroe, Louisiana. She is currently writing a true crime story set in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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