The Lazy Lawrence Murders

The ex-Governor of Texas is traveling with family in preparation for an inadvisable wedding when he is suddenly murdered. His old friend Sheriff Peter Bounty is on hand to try and solve the case. The ex-Governor had enemies, and there are plenty of motives, as Bounty sifts through the clues, suspects, and evidence. This train ride builds suspense to the very last chapter as you follow Bounty on his mission of justice.

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots, LGBTQ life was dominated by the negative image of "the closet"--the metaphorical space where that which was deemed "queer" was hidden from a hostile public view. Literary studies of queer themes and characters in crime fiction have tended to focus on the more positive and explicit representations since the riots, while pre-Stonewall works are thought to reference queer only negatively or obliquely. This collection of new essays questions that view with an investigation of queer aspects in crime fiction published over eight decades, from the corseted Victorian era to the unbuttoned 1960s.

This book analyzes Native-authored detective fiction to consider how Native authors use a popular literary genre to make social, cultural, and political critiques by shedding light on settler-colonial crimes, arguing for strengthened tribal sovereignty, and illustrating the resilience of Indigenous peoples.

An informative and wide-ranging overview of Native American literature from the 1770s to present day.

In "Muting White Noise," James H. Cox considers how Native authors have liberated our imaginations from colonial narratives. Cox takes his title from Sherman Alexie, for whom the white noise of a television set represents the white mass-produced culture that mutes American Indian voices. Cox foregrounds the work of Native intellectuals in his readings of the American Indian novel tradition. He thereby develops a critical perspective from which to re-see the role played by the Euro-American novel tradition in justifying and enabling colonialism.

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox--the decades between 1920 and 1960--have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico--and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era. By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is generally acknowledged. The writers he focuses on--Todd Downing (Choctaw), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and D'Arcy McNickle (Confederated Salish and Kootenai)--are shown to be on par with writers of the preceding Progressive and the succeeding Red Power and Native American literary renaissance eras. Arguing that American Indian literary history of this period actually coheres in exciting ways with the literature of the Native American literary renaissance, Cox repudiates the intellectual and political border that has emerged between the two eras.