Review — Well Deserved
Michael Loyd Gray’s latest novel, Well Deserved shares the same fictional small Midwestern town with his second, December’s Children: Argus, Illinois. There was an Argus the All-Seeing in Greek mythology. Gray could very well be referencing “Argus of the hundred eyes.” We readers are willing witnesses, as well.
His choice offers some pleasing continuities, such as Fleener family. But even without having read December’s Children, this setting will feel comfortable and familiar. It’s old-fashioned small-town America, 1970. Think: Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show, but with enough mustache on Opie that he can enjoy a Pabst at the VFW. Michael Loyd Gray gives us the American Midwest before giant heartless agribusinesses and crystal meth.
In 238 concise pages, four main characters meet and form powerful bonds: Jesse Archer, at twenty years old, drifts from day to day selling pot from his isolated trailer. Raul, a suntanned local son returning from Vietnam, is not quite ready to live within his parent’s familiar walls again. Camping by the lake, he hears Jesse’s Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, and Jimi Hendrix, and they become buds over a few PBR’s. Keeping an eye—though a more fatherly than suspicious one—on the pair of youngsters is the town’s new Chief of Police, Art Millage. His face grazed by a bullet in his native Chicago, Art knows the malice inherent to this world and how close its wrath can come. Finally, there’s the lovely, long-legged Nicole Michelle Beckert, cashier at Ferguson’s IGA and the sharpest and most knowing of the four.
With its controlled substances and the chief cruising in his patrol car, Well Deserved works as crime fiction: not the hard-boiled variety, but with normal people. Art knows well what Jesse is doing by the lake. He is not personally opposed to a puff of MJ himself, for one, and there’s a recognition that the entire police force could comb those dense woods for weeks and never locate the stashed evidence. Jesse may be a dealer, but his motivations are not those most fictional drug-pushing gangsters. He’s a laid-back seventies guy, happy to let his hair grow long and just keep things turning over. A notion is building, as well, that it’s time for him to get out of this game… if only he can. Along comes Raul, the feel of weapons familiar to his hands and nerves attuned to conflict. Slowly, Gray builds toward a climax.
I like the way he writes. Reading Well Deserved is like spending time hanging around a campfire with some friends. There’s also a beautiful GTO with Sergeant Pepper’s on the eight track, and a diner that serves potatoes spiced with a special, elusive ingredient. Argus in that week in 1970 is a great place to be.
—Critical Mick
