Even in this age of political correctness, it's proving difficult for popular fiction to wean itself from stereotypes. Do these sound familiar? Caucasians in the rural U.S. South drive pickup trucks, shoot off guns and harbor a deep suspicion, bordering on hostility, toward non-"WASP" outsiders.
Whether there's much truth to these is beside the point; the image they project has made for great mystery fiction. I refer in particular to John Ball's 1965 whodunit "In the Heat of the Night," about a murder in a small Mississippi town that forces a redneck sheriff and a black detective from Philadelphia to put aside their differences and track down the killer. An outstanding work in its own right, director Norman Jewison's 1967 screen adaptation of Ball's work also conveyed a powerful message just as America's civil rights movement was coming to a head.
Four decades later, the denizens of Dixie are much more open and tolerant, right? Try telling that to Koji Suda of "The Red Earth of Alabama," an English-speaking Tokyo private eye who is hired by Miho Suzuki to hunt for her husband, who has gone missing from his electronics firm while making preparations to set up operations in rural Alabama.