Southern Man by Greg Iles
Dubbed one of America’s greatest storytellers, New York Times bestselling author Greg Iles returns to his beloved Penn Cage character with a thought-provoking and important thriller, Southern Man.
The story takes place 15 years after the release of the third book in Iles’ Natchez Burning trilogy, a series that brought to the surface many of the issues society faced then and still faces today — now with perhaps even more urgency.
“I had written so deeply about race in the trilogy, yet those books had been set prior to the election of Barack Obama,” Iles says, in an interview with BookTrib. “That had prevented me from dealing directly with certain facets of race in America, and then once we reached the insanity of 2016, I realized I was almost forced to return to the subject. I could conceive of no more natural way to do that than to step back into the universe of the Cage family in Mississippi.”
It would mean leaping ahead in time to at least 2016, but Iles went all the way to 2024, a kind of time shift almost unheard of in mystery-type series.
“What most series writers do is to leave their protagonist in a sort of immortal 40s, as if the world is not changing around them, or not by much,” Iles says. “Or maybe they age them from their 30s through their early 50s, but then time sort of ceases to exist. By contrast, I aged Penn, quite literally, 18 years on the page in one go and killed at least one major character off-screen.”
As Iles points out, Penn’s world has always been a blend of factual and fictional America, and although Southern Man is not quite ripped from the headlines, Iles says he’s never written a novel with so many actual real-world characters. A dangerous line to walk, he admits.
“It’s very easy to come off looking like a fool if you’re wrong. Sadly, I may prove to be more right than I feared about what might happen between now and November,” Iles says. “Naturally, covering such a huge gap from a major character’s life and placing him in an entirely new and alien present was a difficult challenge from the point of view of craft, but at least those kinds of problems are solvable by hard work. It’s the deeper themes of a novel like this that are the true challenge.”
It wasn’t the only challenge Iles faced. The author has recently been upfront about his ongoing battle with a rare form of cancer — multiple myeloma. Though considered an “old person’s cancer”, Iles was diagnosed at the age of 36, and for a long time kept his illness a secret. His mom was diagnosed with the same cancer in her late seventies. In Southern Man we learn that Penn Cage has also received this dire diagnosis.
“I had to watch [my mother] die of the disease while I was writing this novel and suffering from it myself,” he says. “I don’t think there is any way I could have gone through the four years it took to produce this novel without including that depressingly unique experience.”
Despite the health challenges Iles continues to face, Southern Man is a weighty book, coming in at almost 1,000 pages. The subject matter is heavy — but Iles deftly navigates the pacing, ensuring readers are immersed to the end. That’s important.
“I’m attempting something very difficult and risky in the present historical moment, which is to write meaningfully about race as a white author,” he says. “In all frankness, I’m writing primarily for a white audience. I have nothing to teach a Black readership about Jim Crow or slavery that they don’t already know far more intimately than I.”
Iles hopes the risk pays off, most significantly to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not made again.
“It seems to me that quite a few human beings, and indeed humanity itself, seem bent on repeating the mistakes of the past, in spite of remembering them quite clearly,” he says. “If we do on a societal scale what individuals so often do on the small scale, we risk losing democracy itself, which could quite literally accelerate the nation and the world toward physical destruction. Those are the stakes of the 2024 election.
“What I want people to take away from this book, is what we have seen made clear since 2016, but people seem unable to grasp: that racism, for which the Deep South has always been excoriated, is not fundamentally a geographically based or confined thing. The white animus toward Black people, particularly Black people as a group or race, exist all over this country, and at a very deep tribal level. That fact is the primary cause of most of the troubles America is enduring today.”
Iles recognizes that by taking a strong political stance — personally, but also with his fiction — he chances alienating readers. But it’s a risk worth taking.
“The relatively mild criticisms of Donald Trump in my last novel, Cemetery Road, triggered some shockingly vitriolic reader mail, as well as efforts by those readers to bomb Amazon with one-star reviews. So obviously, a fundamentally political novel like Southern Man would almost certainly trigger something infinitely worse,” he says. “Anyone who reads my work would likely know I’m the last author to let something like that affect my vision of a book, and I’m certainly not going to soft-pedal anything in the hope of not losing sales.”
As though proving his point, Southern Man has already received critical acclaim.
Iles will now go back to focusing on his health. The cancer — which had lain dormant for 20 years — switched on again and Iles postponed a necessary stem cell transplant to make sure he finished this book. He hopes to complete the procedure within the next three months.
In the meantime, Iles is picking away at what he calls his “Elvis Book,” a thriller set on 1965 during a spiritual crisis in Elvis Presley’s life. The two main fictional characters are Penn Cage’s father, Tom, and his friend, the Texas ranger, Walt Garrity, who are both in their 30s at the time.
“The novel begins on a fictional movie set on the Mississippi coast. It was a dude ranch built by some cronies of Al Capone, and I once stayed there as a boy,” Iles says. “Like some of my other novels, this book also contains some exciting real-world characters. One is Richard Boone, the star and occasional director of Have Gun Will Travel, while others, among several, are Robert Redford and Nathalie Wood. Thankfully, this book is less than a third as long as most of my books, and I think my readers will be ecstatic if this proves to be my next release.”
Regardless of length, Iles fans are always ecstatic with a new release.
About the Author:
Greg Iles has spent most of his life in Natchez, Mississippi. His first novel, Spandau Phoenix, was the first of many New York Times bestsellers. His Natchez Burning trilogy continued the story of Penn Cage, the protagonist of The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, and #1 New York Times bestseller The Devil’s Punchbowl. Iles’s novels have been made into films and published in more than thirty-five countries. He is a member of the lit-rock group The Rock Bottom Remainders, lives in Natchez with his wife, and his three children.
