CANR
WORK TITLE: Broiler
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WEBSITE: http://www.elicranor.com/
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PERSONAL
Born January 15, 1988, in Forrest City, AR; married; two children.
EDUCATION:Florida Atlantic University; Ouachita Baptist University, B.A., English and Political Science.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author. Former player-coach for Swedish-American foortball team; former high school teacher and football coach,Russellville School District, AR; Arkansas Tech University, Writer-in-Residence and Visiting Lecturer in English, beginning 2023.
AWARDS:Peter Lovesy First Crime Novel Contest Winner, Don’t Know Tough; Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel, Don’t Know Tough, 2023.
WRITINGS
Contributor of weekly column, “Where I’m Writing From,” in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette; contributor of monthly craft column, “Shop Talk,” in CrimeReads.
SIDELIGHTS
Eli Cranor is an Arkansas author whose path to writing bestselling crime and noir novels was not the usual one. Born to parents who were public school teachers, he grew up with an appreciation for reading and writing, but by high school, football was his focus. A star quarterback, he was recruited by Florida Atlantic University and played on the school’s team for one season before transferring to Ouachita Baptist University, majoring in English and setting passing records on the football field.
Out of college, Cranor was then recruited as a player-coach for the Carlstad Crusaders, a Swedish-American football team based in Sweden and playing in the European leagues. Cranor was with the team for just under a year and then met the woman who would become his wife. He moved back to Arkansas where he took a teaching and coaching position in the Russelville School District in which he had grown up.
Soon, coaching was replaced with another passion: writing. He took to heart an old axiom: write what you know about. He crafted a tale about a talented but troubled running back for an Arkansas high school team who is accused of murder just before the playoffs. Canor worked on that novel for five years with rejections from 200 literary agents. And then came his big break: the novel won Soho Press’ Peter Lovesy First Crime Novel Contest and was published nationally as Don’t Know Tough to critical acclaim. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for numerous other debut mystery awards.
Don’t Know Tough is set in the Arkansas town of Denton, and its high school football team depends on its star running back, Billy Lowe. Billy has a troubled home life in a trailer park where his mother’s abusive boyfriend, Travis, torments him. Billy plays out his anger on the football field. His coach, Trent Powers, a born-again Christian, sees it his mission to save Billy from his background and his anger. However, when Travis is found dead in the Lowe family trailer on the eve of the state playoffs and Billy becomes the obvious suspect, a violent chain of events sets off in the town.
A Kirkus Reviews critic concluded of Don’t Know Tough: “Friday Night Darks.” Writing in Booklist, Bill Ott praised the “crackle of Cranor’s electric prose,” further noting that the “buzz is growing for this superb debut.” Writing in Library Journal, Nanette Donohue, also had a high assessment of this novel, commenting: “Cranor’s debut is a searing exploration of the toxic heart of Southern high school football culture.” Likewise, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted; “Readers will be curious to see what Cranor does next.”
What Cranor did next was create another Arkansas-based novel, Ozark Dogs, dealing with feuding families that “escalates with the fury of Greek tragedy in Cranor’s fact-based thriller,” according to a Kirkus Reviews critic. The Fitzjurls family and the Leford family have feuded since Tom Fitzjurls killed Rudnick Ledford in a dispute over a woman. Tom is sent away for life in prison, and his young daughter is left to be raised by his father, Jeremiah, a former sniper in Vietnam. Now a high school senior, this young woman, Jo, is ready to escape the restrictions Jeremiah has placed on her. At the same time, Evail, brother of the slain Rudnick, has long searched for a way to get back at the Fitzjurls family. His family being meth dealers and white supremacists, he decides the perfect way is to capture Jo and hand her over to a major meth dealer who guarantees 50 pounds of meth for each American girl Evail can deliver. This sets the stage for a major conflagration.
Writing in Booklist, Bill Ott had high praise for Ozark Dogs, noting: “Cranor has transformed a familiar noir theme into a multidimensional tragedy of great power and beauty.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer also commended this second novel, commenting that the “author has a superior gift for capturing the cadences and feel of Southern small towns.”
Cranor’s third novel, Broiler, again focuses on the lives of small-town residents in Arkansas enduring an explosive situation. Gabriela and Edwin are undocumented workers at Detmer Foods, a chicken plant run by Luke Jackson. Gabriela is drained after years working long days as a chicken plucker. In spite of working hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, she and Edwin are three months behind on their rent. Still, Gabriela has dreams of making a real life after working in the plant. Meanwhile Luke also has plans, hoping for a promotion. His wife, Mimi, is struggling with depression after the birth of their infant son. Now, when Luke suddenly fires Edwin for arriving two minutes late for work, a cycle of tragedy ensues. Edwin takes Luke’s infant son, demanding $50,000 for his return. Luke is afraid to go to the police, fearing that this will jeopardize his promotion. This sets in motion a chain of events that do not end well.
A Kirkus Reviews critic commenting on the chain of events set in motion, noted: “The string of felonies can’t compete with the chicken-plucking background for intensity and horror.” Writing in Library Journal, Michael Pucci felt that the “brutal conditions in the chicken plant would make Upton Sinclair proud.” Pucci further felt that this novel is another “winner by a rising star of Southern noir.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 15, 2022, Bill Ott, review of Don’t Know Tough, p. 47; April 15, 2023, Bill Ott, review of Ozark Dogs, p. 23.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2022, review of Don’t Know Tough; February 1, 2023, review of Ozark Dogs; May 15, 2024, review of Broiler.
Library Journal, March, 2022; Nanette Donohue, review of Don’t Know Tough, p. 121; May, 2024, Michael Pucci, review of Broiler, p. 78.
PRWeb Newswire, December 2, 2020, “Eli Cranor’s ‘Don’t Know Tough’ Wins the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest Presented by Soho Crime.”
Publishers Weekly, January 10, 2022, Don’t Know Tough, p. 38; February 6, 2023, review of Ozark Dogs, p. 42.
ONLINE
Arkansas Democrat Gazette, https://www.arkansasonline.com/ (Aprul 5, 2023), Philip Martin, “Five Questions with ‘Ozark Dogs’ Author Eli Cranor.”
Arkansas Tech News, https://www.arkansastechnews.com/ (July 25, 2023), “Cranor to Serve as Writer in Residence at ATU.”
Arkansas Times, https://arktimes.com/ (March 28, 2024), Daniel Grear, “Turning the Eclipse into Fiction: A Q&A with Writer Eli Cranor.”
Do South, https://dosouthmag.com/ (Sepember 1, 2023), Maria Cantrell, “Tough as Nails, Meaner than a Junkyard Dog – The Sweet Writing Life of Award-Winning Novelist Eli Cranor.”
Eli Cranor website, http://www.elicranor.com (June 3, 2024).
Good Reading, https://goodreadingmagazine.com.au/ (August 1, 2022), “Q&A with Eli Cranor.”
Only in Arkansas, https://onlyinark.com/ (April 5, 2023). “Eli Cranor: An Author That’s Ozark Tough.”
Nationally-bestselling, Edgar Award-winning author Eli Cranor lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle where he is the "Writer in Residence" at Arkansas Tech University.
He is the author of Don't Know Tough and Ozark Dogs, which were both named "Best Crime Novels" of the year by the New York Times, among others.
Eli also pens a weekly column, "Where I'm Writing From" for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and his craft column, "Shop Talk," appears monthly at CrimeReads.
Turning the eclipse into fiction: A Q&A with writer Eli Cranor
BY Daniel Grear ONMarch 28, 20244:04 pm
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BRIAN CHILSON
Eli Cranor
We’re big admirers of Pope County writer Eli Cranor over here at the Arkansas Times. So big, in fact, that we asked him to pen an original short story for our April issue of the magazine to coincide with the imminent total solar eclipse on April 8.
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(Our April issue hit newsstands today, and you should race out to get one!)
Cranor, 36, has two novels under his belt so far: 2022’s Edgar Award-winning “Don’t Know Tough” and 2023’s “Ozark Dogs,” both of which are set in fictional Arkansas towns that closely resemble real places. In a profile of Cranor from last year, former Arkansas Times Editor Lindsey Millar called the latter “a white-knuckle thrill ride filled with all sorts of evocative detail.”
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Cranor’s next novel, “Broiler,” comes out in July, and takes place in Springdale, where an undocumented employee at a Tyson Foods-esque chicken plant harbors a revenge plan against the plant manager who unjustly fired him. An advance blurb by writer Laura Lippman asserts that it’s “a satisfying hunk of noir that tells us far more about the American South than those endless newspaper think pieces set in diners and gas stations. Want to understand what’s going on in the United States right now? Read Eli Cranor.”
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“The Gloam” — Cranor’s engrossing new story about a bound-for-breakup couple hawking bootleg MAGA wares in London, Arkansas, during the town’s eclipse festivities — debuts in our April issue. To tide you over until you can nab a copy, we chatted with Cranor about his writing process, the versatility of crime fiction and how he’s planning to spend the celestial holiday.
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You’ve published two novels in two years and have another on the way. How much are you still writing short stories and what motivates you to keep doing so?
Short stories tend to come between the books. I’m really kind of a hamster when it comes to writing. I like to always keep moving and always have something to work on. I get up pretty early and do an hour or two of just writing. I write everything out longhand when I’m doing fiction. We have two kids, so I try to get it all done before they get up. That part of my day is just built into every day, seven days a week, no matter what. I always kind of liken it to meditation, or a workout, or any sort of thing that you do that’s built into your routine. If I don’t do it, I feel weird for the rest of the day.
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I keep a little list of ideas and some ideas are smaller or bigger than others. When I finish a book, I’ll look through there and think, “Would any of these smaller ideas fit a short story?” I like to dive right in. And I like to do shorter things to cleanse the palate. Most of the time, those longer projects are never actually done. [laughs] So it’s nice to slip into a smaller world for a little while. And it helps me get fresh eyes for the bigger projects, when the revisions come.
How do you think of short stories as different from novels?
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They’re more freeing in a lot of ways. I love short stories. I cut my teeth on short stories. Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, Flannery O’Connor, all of those kinds of Southern writers. In recent years, I’ve really gotten into a guy named Elmore Leonard. But, like I said, “freer” is the word that is most apt, because they can be weirder, you don’t have to hit certain beats. I write crime novels, which is a pretty wide label. And my short stories are often crime-related, too, but you can really get into the goofiness of criminals, especially small-scale criminals. And it doesn’t have to resolve. You can focus more on the writing.
Does “The Gloam,” the story you wrote for the Arkansas Times, fall under the crime genre? It feels more like literary fiction to me.
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When I started writing, I never set out to write crime fiction. And I really didn’t read a lot of it. The only reason I ever got into crime was because I couldn’t find anybody who’d publish any of my stuff. And so I found a contest for the first book [“Don’t Know Tough”] and it just happened to be for a debut crime novel. And there was a crime, just like in the short story, there’s a crime at the heart of it. And I guess that’s all that’s required.
I think crime, in many ways, defines culture. What we allow people to get away with. In another country, there’s different laws, and crimes are defined differently. And so I think that’s one of the biggest powers of crime fiction. It’s a magnifying glass. It’s a viewing lens into a society, which was what, for me, “The Gloam” was really about. Taking the eclipse and using that to amplify and be a frame to look at this craziness that’s going on in our culture, and specifically Arkansas.
The story is about 4,000 words long and we gave you very little time to write it. It feels like you pulled it out of thin air, and yet it’s so polished. How’d you make it happen so fast?
This was such a serendipitous project. I’m a writer in residence here at the local university [Arkansas Tech University]. I had told my students about this idea I had for a short story. The idea was simply that there’s going to be 4 minutes and 12 seconds of totality and everybody around here is going to be looking up. If you’re a small-town criminal, that’s 4 minutes and 12 seconds that you could get away with something. Not necessarily go rob a bank, but there’s going to be a window of time where you could get away with something.
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I put it all out to them. I was like, “Somebody write this story because I don’t have time.” I was knee deep in finishing up a final draft on a book. This is where the serendipity plays in. Because literally the day I sent the book off to my agent, [Arkansas Times Editor] Austin [Gelder] emailed me saying, “Okay, we have nine days. Is there any chance you write an eclipse story?” And I was like, “Yes! Actually, I would love to.” It was all kind of perfect. I wrote the first draft in four days.
What are your plans for the eclipse?
Well, we live right here where the story is set. We live on the banks of Lake Dardanelle in a little town called London right outside of Russellville, where my wife and I are both from. We’re 50 feet back from the water. We’ve got a little pontoon boat and our hope is to watch it from the water and see what that feels like.
One thing that writing the story did [was make me] do research on what totality is really like. There are all these great blogs from people who travel the country and the world in search of the next totality. We know how big and cool this one is because of all the hype, but it really is [special]. [These bloggers] are going for 30-second and 40-second totalities and we’re going to have 4 minutes. All the stuff that’s in the story about [it looking like a] diamond ring and the prominences of solar flares and iridescent clouds — all of that was what I read. They describe it like this otherworldly experience.
Daniel Grear
Daniel Grear is the culture editor at the Arkansas Times. Send artsy tips to danielgrear@arktimes.com
Five Questions with “Ozark Dogs” author Eli Cranor
April 5, 2023 at 1:38 p.m.
by Philip Martin
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Eli Cranor (courtesy photo)
Eli Cranor (courtesy photo)
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette “Where I’m Writing From” columnist Eli Cranor released his second novel last week — his violent and propulsive “Ozark Dogs” is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed debut novel, “Don’t Know Tough,” which won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and was named one of the “Best Books of the Year” by USA Today and one of the “Best Crime Novels” of 2022 by the New York Times. He “lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle, a reservoir of the Arkansas River nestled in the heart of True Grit country.”
Cranor was a 6-foot-2-inch, 176-pound quarterback at Russellville High in the mid-200s0. He signed to play college ball with Florida Atlantic and spent a redshirt year under legendary coach Howard Schnellenberger before transferring to Ouachita Baptist, where he set single-season passing and total offense records for the Tigers in 2010.
[Video not showing above? Click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC_TtrkDj0g ]
After that, he went pro, signing with the Carlstad Crusaders in Karlstad, Sweden. He promptly led them to the 2011 Swedish National Championship, throwing for two touchdowns and rushing for one other in the championship game. He was named Most Valuable Player of the league.
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Then he got married. He thought about law school but missed the deadline for taking the Law School Admission Test. He took a job as offensive coordinator at Arkadelphia High School, then a couple of years later became head coach at Clarksville — and decided coaching high school football wasn’t for him, at least not then. He scaled back, took a job as an assistant and began to write. He had a daughter on the way. He didn’t want to spend his kid’s childhood in a fieldhouse, so he gave up football.
Right now, he’s on a book tour, which will bring him to WordsWorth Books in Little Rock on April 8 at 4 p.m.
He answered some questions from the road.
Q. Without dismissing the power of imagination, it seems pretty clear to me that a character like Evail Ledford has to be drawn from life — I know erudite, articulate, wrongheaded guys like that who seem to be operating at a remove from the true believer they present as. There’s a kind of cynicism present in Evail — he’s willing to make common cause with people his father Bunn sees as the enemy — that made me think that if he’d come up in different circumstances he might have had a career in opinion journalism. Is he a careerist white supremacist or just a very pragmatic bigot?
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A. A career in opinion journalism probably isn’t too far off. Evail is the “bad guy” in “Ozark Dogs.” One of many, actually. But I always try to adhere to that Tarrantino—or maybe it was Dostoyevsky—quote when it comes to my fiction: there are no bad guys, everybody just has their own perspective.
Q. Some writers might be insulted by the insinuation that their work is highly commercial but I think that you’ve succeeded in pulling off something exceedingly difficult — both of your novels can be read as literary works (i.e., for their ideals and the dynamics of your style) but they also function as page-turning thrillers — violent and unpredictable as nature itself. The literary comp that comes first to my mind is probably Jim Thompson, though you might have another model in mind. (A totally different sort of writer who was both accessible and of literary value was Charles Portis.)
A. I majored in English Literature in college. As a result, I cut my teeth on Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, and of course, Charles Portis. I didn’t read much genre fiction at all until my first novel won a “crime fiction” contest. At that point, I thought I’d better do my homework.
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So I dove into crime writers like Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Charles Williford, James Crumley, and yes, Jim Thompson. The common element for me is a love of language. I’m not so much worried about plot when I’m reading; I’m just looking for a certain verve. Some of my favorite crime novelists working today are Megan Abbott, Jordan Harper, S.A. Cosby, Lou Berney, James Kestrel, and Peter Lovesey. Each one of those authors is keenly aware of their work on a line by line level.
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Q. I’ve always had a fascination with athletes who turn out to be interesting writers — John Ed Bradley, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Pat Jordan and maybe we could throw Jack Kerouac into the mix — and I wonder if you think that, aside from giving you experiences and context from which to draw, your football career might inform your writing. Maybe the discipline involved in team sports translates to a writing life, maybe realizing the incremental growth that hard training forces — or maybe there’s even some fuel provided by the need/desire to show you’re not simply a meathead jock?
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And is your next book staying in the same universe as your first two novels?
A. You’re not wrong on any of those fronts. My career as a quarterback and then a coach has greatly shaped my writing. I work at this thing pretty hard, too hard, sometimes. I played my college ball at Ouachita Baptist University. Coach Knight and Coach Derby instilled a “sense of urgency” into all of their players. There’s not a doubt in my mind that urgency has gotten me to this point. The question now becomes whether or not I can keep it going. This writing game is a marathon, not a sprint. I guess the same can be said of making a career out of anything, though, even football.
I’ve got two manuscripts ready at the moment. Not sure which one will hit. Both stay in the same universe but in different lanes. One is a zany college football story. Think the craziness that went down when Hugh Freeze was at Ole Miss—dirty money, teenage athletes, bagmen—told in the voice of Elmore Leonard. The other book is a canoe trip gone wrong on a remote creek in Arkansas, basically a modern take on Deliverance. Only The Shadow knows which way it’ll go…
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Q. You’ve been very straightforward and generous in your column about people who guided, encouraged and mentored you. I don’t know how it was for you, but sometimes I feel that when I was in high school I m ight have been one of the most unlikely kids to ever have a writing life — I didn’t really consider a possibility until I was 25 years old and the Shreveport Journal gave me a three-day-a-week column on the newspaper’s front page. (They didn’t do that because of my reporting chops; which were adequate.) I something think the better part of realizing a dream is formulating the dream and I’m wondering when and how you first imagined yourself a writer?
A. I took a creative writing course my senior year at OBU. Johnny Wink taught that class. His love of language and stories made me want to be a writer. I was reading a lot of Larry Brown back in those days. Johnny and I watched Larry’s documentary together in my apartment. Larry talked a lot about how much he had to work to become a published novelist. How writing was no different than laying bricks—it took practice. Until that point, I hadn’t really heard anybody talk about writing in that way, but it made sense to me. I had to work my butt off to play college football. Why should publishing be any different? That was how I looked at writing early on, but now I’m starting to see that art and athletics are two seperate endeavors. Publishing, on the other hand, is a business, an industry, and my dogged football mindset definitely helped me get a foot in the door.
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Q. I feel like you’d make a good songwriter.There’s a intrinsic rhythm to your writing that hints at a certain musicality, and your prose is compacted and freighted in the way the best song lyrics can be. (I’m thinking of lyricists like Jason Isbell, James McMurtry, Merle Haggard and John Prine rather than more impressionistic — and admirable — ones like Jackson Browne or Joni Mitchell.) I know you play a little guitar and perform, I’m wondering if you’ve given much thought to how much music informs your writing?
A. Yeah, I’m always thinking on the rhythm of a line. I read everything out loud before it goes to print. John Prine. Jason Isbell. Jerry Jeff Walker. Jimmy Buffett. Harry Chapin. Those guys were all huge influences on me. We’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re telling stories.
Eli Cranor: An Author That’s Ozark Tough
April 5, 2023
Author
Keisha Pittman McKinney
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There is something about Arkansas and football. Stories of the game are woven into the very fabric of our state. This story starts like a regular, All-American football in the South story. There are twists, turns and a bit of mystery. However, that is not the plot of the upcoming novel by Arkansan Eli Cranor; that is the story of his life so far. And we are intrigued by the stories he has told and the ones on down the field.
Eli Cranor is the son of public school teachers, a Russellville High School standout athlete and an All-American kid. He turned down the ideal football recruitment package to answer the what-ifs at a college closer to the beach. But it was short-lived. After one year of playing with sand in his toes and beach waves after practice, his heart was still tethered closer to home.
Cranor ate crow and called his recruiter to see if the offer might still be on the table. And it was. That coaching relationship turned into a friendship and a bond of mentoring, discipleship, and something much bigger than what happened on the gridiron.
With a highly anticipated novel releasing this week, we sat down with Eli Cranor, standout athlete turned football coach, English teacher and novelist, to hear more of this gripping story.
Q&A with Eli Cranor:
Let’s start with the obvious, where did you find interest in writing a book?
My parents were both public school teachers. In the summers, my dad made me keep a summer reading journal. I hated it, always getting frustrated, claiming, “This was the worst day ever.” But, just like sports, with practice, I got good at reading…and writing. So, I kept practicing.
How does a guy like you go from quarterback to author?
The easy answer is…I just kept writing. But it was not that easy. I did play college football and in an overseas league after graduation. Then, I returned to Arkansas to join my mentor, JR Eldridge, as his assistant coach. And then, a few years later, I got a head coaching job. That is the ultimate dream as a coach; you want to be at the helm. But it was a lot. I was 26, and we were not winning. I had a baby at home, and I was feeling the pressure, and yet I looked at the guys I was coaching and thought their lives were complicated beyond what I was dealing with in the locker room.
So, I stepped back. I moved closer to my hometown, into the English classroom and stayed in that space with my students. But I never quit writing all along, any chance I got – between meetings, on the school bus, during my planning period, and during lunch break.
In some ways, it was always there. In other ways, I just had to keep working at it.
In 2022, you released your debut novel, “Don’t Know Tough.” Where did you develop your plot and characters?
This is always everyone’s first question. They want to know if this story is based on a real town, real people or real events. And my first answer is “Yes, but.” The stories of these characters and this rural town in Arkansas are real, but they are not based on any one place. I thought about the guys I met on my teams, where they lived, and the real issues their families faced. I could relate to the coach in the story, where you sometimes feel the weight of being a mayor, sheriff, and youth pastor all in one role.
When I wrote the line, “I still the feel the burn on my neck, told the coach it was a ringworm, but it ain’t,” I knew I had something. But what was published was my fifth edition. I wrote this story in 2017, which wasn’t released until 2022. It was rejected over 200 times, but I knew I had something, and I was not willing to give up.
Does Arkansas play a significant role in your novel?
An old phrase in writing is “Write what you know.” If that were always true, we would have a lot more boring books, but for me, setting my book in Arkansas was what I know and wanted to offer – the good, the bad and the ugly. I wanted to tell the real story of some sections of Arkansas that do not always get a voice.
The stories are painful, but so are the statistics. I was not holding anything back. I try to do my best to share an honest look at the lives of these athletes and their families. I expose a different view of poverty in Arkansas, even using a unique “hill country” vernacular of the main character as a voice throughout the book. I wanted to share real life and not the predictable story. Real life does not fit a formula.
Tell us about your next novel, “Ozark Dogs.”
“Ozark Dogs” releases on April 4th. It is also set in Arkansas, but the characters and storyline differ. This novel has more considerable implications for the state as a whole. It is a classical tragedy, Hatfields and McCoys, with a Romeo and Juliet underplot. No doubt, people who like the series “Ozark” will find this fascinating.
As a writer, who inspires you?
Goodness, so many people, especially teachers. My college professor, Dr. Johnny Wink, is a big inspiration. I still talk to him every week. We catch up on life, and I read him some of what I have written that week and take his criticism and feedback. As a student, Ms. Franks and Ms. Crews, both of these teachers believed in me and invested in me as a kid who loved English, reading and writing.
What is next for you?
I am thankful for some of the attention and awards “Don’t Know Tough” received in 2022. It is up for an Edgar Award (think Tony’s or Oscars for mystery writers), and my wife and I are excited to travel for that. Also, with the release of this new novel, we have a book tour in April. As for writing, I am working on two other stories. One involves an Arkansas canoe trip gone wrong, and the other is a new arena for me, but it gets back to my football roots and some old, untold stories.
Eli Cranor
Where can we find your work?
Books – wherever books are sold, local stores like Dog Ear Books and online outlets
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette weekly column, Where I’m writing from
Shop Talk series on CrimeReads
Oeuvre – short stories and online literary works
Elicranor.com | Twitter | Facebook
Ozark Dogs Arkansas Launch Book Tour
April 4th @ 6 p.m. | Arkansas Tech University Library | Russellville
April 6th @7 p.m. | Pearl’s Books | Fayetteville
April 7th @ 6 p.m. | Two Friends | Bentonville
April 8th @ 4 p.m. | Wordsworth | Little Rock
All images in this article courtesy of Eli Cranor – Author.
Born “in the Delta and raised in the Valley,” Eli Cranor has lived in Forrest City and Russellville in Arkansas, as well as in South Florida and overseas. An English and political science major at Ouachita Baptist University, Cranor planned to go to law school after getting his bachelor’s degree but instead moved to Sweden, where he was a professional quarterback for a year. Once back in America, Cranor returned to Arkansas, where he coached and worked as a high school English teacher for five years. This is when his short story, “Don’t Know Tough” won the Miller Audio Prize from The Greensboro Review in 2017 and The Robert Watson Literary Prize from the Missouri Review in 2018. Between 2019 and 2020, Cranor contributed a series of creative essays to The Oxford American – an American quarterly literary magazine featuring writing from the South – as well as wrote a weekly sports column called “Athletic Support,” that appeared in many newspapers across the nation. His first self-published children’s book, “Books Make Brainz Taste Bad,” was created to educate children on the power that knowledge and literacy hold. His short story, “Don’t Know Tough” was the basis for his new novel by the same name, exploring a high school football player who is struggling, a coach who is trying to help and a murder that looms over their Arkansas town.
Cranor to Serve as Writer in Residence at ATU
July 25, 2023
Eli Cranor
Eli Cranor
Author and Russellville native Eli Cranor will join the Arkansas Tech University College of Arts and Humanities as writer in residence and instructor in the ATU Department of English and World Languages beginning with the fall 2023 semester.
Cranor has written two novels — “Don’t Know Tough” and “Ozark Dogs” — and he has teaching experience at the K-12 level.
“Eli has gained considerable and well-deserved praise for his talent as a writer,” said Dr. Jeff Cass, dean of the ATU College of Arts and Humanities. “He will serve as a role model and mentor for aspiring authors in our student body. Collaborations such as this are important because they help a diverse community of writers gain the knowledge and confidence necessary to step forward and tell the story of our region and our times.”
Cranor’s debut novel, “Don’t Know Tough,” won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest. It was named to USA Today’s list of Best Books of the Year and one of the New York Times’ Best Crime Novels of 2022. Mystery Writers of America selected Cranor as the winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel by an American author.
Publisher Soho Crime describes “Ozark Dogs” as a “Southern thriller” in which “two families grapple with the aftermath of a murder in their small Arkansas town.” It was published in April 2023 and has since become a national bestseller.
Cranor played college football at Florida Atlantic University and Ouachita Baptist University. He played professional football and was a high school football coach. Today, he lives in his hometown with his wife and children. Cranor plans on incorporating his life experiences in his fall 2023 Introduction to Film course at ATU.
Cranor’s weekly slice of life column, “Where I’m Writing From,” is published by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and his craft column, “Shop Talk,” appears monthly at www.crimereads.com.
Learn more about Cranor at www.elicranor.com.
Learn more about the ATU College of Arts and Humanities at www.atu.edu/humanities.
Q&A with Eli Cranor
ARTICLE | ISSUE: AUG 2022
ELI CRANOR played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he’s traded in the pigskin for a laptop, writing from Arkansas where he lives.
Eli’s novel Don’t Know Tough won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest with The New York Times calling it, ‘Southern noir at its finest, a cauldron of terrible choices and even more terrible outcomes.’
What do you think it was about Don’t Know Tough that helped you break through as a debut novelist?
You know, I almost said it was my protagonist’s voice. Billy Lowe is this hard-nosed kid from Arkansas. He’s a running back for the high school football team. And his voice just cuts straight through. But honestly, I think it was the fact that this book took five years to get published that made all the difference. I was constantly working on the manuscript over that time, taking advice from agents and friends. Every revision got it leaner and cleaner. That’s the trick with writing, isn’t it? Any line that’s worth a damn was revised down to the bone.
How did your experiences as a quarterback and coach impact your writing?
In the States, coaches are charged with being mentors to their players. That’s a good thing. You want to use sports as a way to sharpen the boys into better young men. The problem is we put so much emphasis on winning, that oftentimes coaches lose sight of the most important part of their job. It was that pull of loyalties that really started the friction I needed to write this book.
Are characters like volcanic high school footballer Billy, his California transplant coach Trent, and others, inspired by people you’ve met on your own footballing journey?
This is the question I get the most, and the truth is they’re all this strange mixture of coaches and players I came in contact with. At the same time, there are also parts of me in every character in this book.
Why do you think the sports world can make a great setting for crime stories?
Sports are perfect for crime novels because there’s a whole subculture already built in. Nobody peels back the layers of these subcultures better than Megan Abbott. She’s done it with cheer and most recently ballet in her amazing book The Turnout. Sport provides a tightly confined space. There’s nothing more harrowing than violence in close quarters.
What are you working on next?
My next novel, Ozark Dogs, is loosely based on a murder in my hometown from a few years back. The book will be published by Soho Crime in the US spring of 2023 [autumn in Australia].
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nationally-bestselling author Eli Cranor lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle where he is the “Writer in Residence” at Arkansas Tech University.
Visit Eli Cranor’s website
Tough as Nails, Meaner than a Junkyard Dog – The Sweet Writing Life of Award-Winning Novelist Eli Cranor
WORDS Marla Cantrell
IMAGES courtesy Eli Cranor
Sep 1, 2023 | Featured, People
Eli
It’s one o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon when award-winning novelist Eli Cranor walks into Dog Ear Books in Russellville, Arkansas. Conjure up an image of a nose-to-the-grindstone writer, and you might imagine rounded shoulders, a gaze rising above a pair of strong eyeglasses, the slight paunch of someone who sits for too long, day after day, bathed in the artificial glow of a computer screen.
Eli is none of that. The former football star—quarterback at Russellville High School; quarterback at Ouachita Baptist University; quarterback for the pro team, the Carlstad Crusaders in Sweden—moves with the grace of a longtime athlete. He’s spent twenty-nine of his thirty-five years keeping his eye on the ball, first on the field and later as a high school coach. With that behind him, he now swims every day, not far from his house on nearby Lake Dardanelle.
In the water, he is alone with his thoughts, and those thoughts are anchored in what he’s writing. The rugged stories that materialize are set in fictionalized towns in Arkansas, populated by characters wise in the ways of the Ozarks.
In both of his novels, Don’t Know Tough, published in 2022, and Ozark Dogs, published in 2023, Eli shows the underbelly of Arkansas, the places where poverty abounds, where desperate people who dare to dream at all, dream modestly, and football is always the biggest game in town. Arkansas is a character itself, where survival can depend on how well you know the land, how well you can navigate the cliffs and valleys, waterways, and woods. Especially when someone’s hunting you down. Because in Eli’s hard-boiled books, there’s always someone out to get you.
The nation has taken notice of his writing, of lines like this one: Arkansas hills produce crazy like the Earth’s mantle produces diamonds. The sentence is given extra meaning when you consider the Crater of Diamonds in Murfreesboro, the only place in Arkansas or the nation where diamonds are mined.
In a stroke of acclaim rarely given to first-time novelists, New York Times writer Sarah Weinman praised Don’t Know Tough in her review, in March 2022. The book was later named one of the Best Crime Novels by the prestigious newspaper. It also won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by An American Author and was the winner of the Lovesay First Crime Novel Contest.
Eli carries these accolades carefully, holding them in grateful hands. As he walks past a display in Dog Ear Books, where copies of Ozark Dogs sprawl across a prominent shelf, he smiles, drawing in the light around him. He is wearing a St. Louis Cardinals jersey. He has a covey of soft bracelets on one wrist. He has sunglasses tucked in the V of his shirt. Later he will laugh and say that a noted writer once described him as “a bald, bearded, white guy from Arkansas.”
Eli dedicated Ozark Dogs to his father, penning: for Dad, who taught me how to write with a bucketful of baseballs.
Baseballs. Not footballs. Curious choice of words.
The story goes like this. Eli’s dad, Finley Cranor, did teach his son how to write, but not in the way you might imagine. “By the fourth grade, my dad thought I was becoming too much of a jock,” Eli says. “So, the summer leading up to the fifth grade, he made me write a page in a journal and read twenty pages of any book I wanted, before I could get on the bike and go play with the kids. I did this until I was a sophomore in high school.”
Eli strokes his beard, so long it covers his throat. “’You’re not coming out of the room, son, until it’s done,’” he mimics his father, his voice booming.
As the only child of two devoted schoolteachers, Eli had the good fortune of growing up feeling safe and loved. He learned perseverance, the relief of tackling a project early in the day. He visited a magnitude of worlds contained in the pages of books. But that was not the end of the story.
“Dad used to make me throw a hundred strikes from one of those five-gallon buckets. He would sit on the bucket of baseballs and hold his catcher’s mitt, and he would call the strikes. Who knows how many pitches it would take to get to a hundred called strikes? We did that every day, and I hated it. We would go to the beach with our whole family, and before it was time to hit the beach, we’d be out in the condo parking lot.”
Like a kid who recovers after being forced to take bitter medicine, Eli now appreciates the rigor of his childhood. Most days, he’s up at five in the morning, writing longhand, waiting for the sun to rise.
While he credits his dad for giving him the gumption to write, he also says he wouldn’t be where he is without Ouachita Baptist professor Johnny Wink. Eli would likely be writing legal drafts, arguing cases in court, if not for him.
“It was my junior year when I took Intro to Creative Writing.” Eli makes a zero with his thumb and forefinger, then holds the circle to his eye and says, “Johnny Wink wears Coke-bottle glasses. Only wears homemade, screen-printed shirts, with couplets from Shakespearian sonnets—like ‘Winged speed no motion shall I know.’—on them.
“Johnny has a parlor trick. He has all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets committed to memory, still, and he turns eighty this year, and he’s still teaching. He’d walk in with the collection of sonnets, and he’d throw the book on the table, and he’d ask somebody to pick a sonnet. You’d pick sonnet fifty-one, and he’d say, ‘Pick a line.’ So, you’d say line nine, and then he’d recite it. He does it like this: he walks, and as he walks, he goes through the sonnets sequentially. Early on, I asked him why he did it. Johnny said, ‘It’s beautiful furniture for the brain.’
“I felt a spark in that class. I realized I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I then took Advanced Creative Writing with him, and to this day, I call him every Tuesday. He’s my momentum because every week, I have to gear up because I read to him at the end of the call. He’s a big cheerleader, but you can kind of gauge when he really likes something, so I pick the best scene I’ve been working on.”
As Eli is describing what led him to the page, a woman with short hair and a bright T-shirt stops by to say hello. She’s just finished reading Ozark Dogs, and says, “I was up until three in the morning, Eli. I had to find out what happened.” Eli beams, chats for a minute, and the woman moves on.
Eli taps his sandaled foot, takes a sip of the coffee he bought when he arrived. Just outside the door and across a parking lot sits the Methodist church where he grew up, and where he still plays music. Eli’s wife, Mallory, was a schoolmate, although the two didn’t connect until after Eli was home for a break, when he was playing football in Sweden. They now have two children, a daughter who’s six and a son who’s three.
Another new development? Eli’s the brand-new Writer in Residence at Arkansas Tech University, just over a mile from where he sits. “It’s a dream,” he says, describing the writing class he’ll teach, the high schools he’ll visit to introduce kids to the college. The time he’ll carve out to write.
Already, his third novel is on its way. Broiler, which tackles the chicken industry in Northwest Arkansas, will be published in 2024. Eli sighs, the first sign that he might understand he’s working at breakneck speed in an industry that’s known to move slower than traffic after an Arkansas ice storm.
There are so many stories to tell. Ones with characters like Bunn, Belladonna, and Evail Ledford. Jeremiah Fitzjurls, Dime Ray Belly.
Eli rubs his neck and looks at the time. His next stop is the lake, where he’ll swim and hope for a new story to emerge. The lakes and rivers and creeks of Arkansas hold secrets, and sometimes Eli can hear them. It’s the same with the Ozark hills, where somebody will be dreaming big tonight. An actual brick house one day. A night’s sleep not interrupted by someone fighting in the house. No more shut-off notices from the utility companies. Eli hears it all, and when he transfers it to paper, the story becomes magic.
In his hands, an entire world appears, purely southern, authentically Arkansas. You may not know tough before you read Eli, but you certainly will once you’re finished.
Eli Cranor’s books are available locally at Bookish in Fort Smith, Chapters on Main in Van Buren, and Dog Ear Books in Russellville. Don’t Know Tough and Ozark Dogs, published by Soho Press, Inc., are also available from all major bookstores.
NEW YORK (PRWEB) December 02, 2020
Soho Press is pleased to announce that the winner of the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest is "Don't Know Tough" by Eli Cranor, a novel about a high school football player with an explosively troubled home life, the idealistic coach who thinks he can save him, and the murder that threatens to tear their Arkansas town apart on the eve of the playoffs.
The winning manuscript was selected from more than two hundred entrants by a panel of Soho Press editors and the famed mystery novelist Peter Lovesey. The winner will be published in Spring 2022 by Soho Crime.
The contest, held to commemorate Lovesey's 50th anniversary as a mystery writer, was announced at the 2019 Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Dallas. Mr. Lovesey and the judges also recognized two honorable mentions: Catherine Hendricks's "Hardways" and Dan Wever's "The Prince of Thieves."
Lovesey, whose debut novel, "Wobble to Death," was published in 1970 after he won a first novel contest he saw advertised in The Times, is no stranger to this sort of competition and appreciated the chance to pay forward the good luck he had 50 years ago.
"It really packs a punch," says Lovesey of the manuscript he selected as the winner. "I enjoyed reading between the lines, dreading the trouble Billy was bringing on himself and his fragile life-chances. At the heart of the book is the pull of loyalties--the football team, the family and religion. The characters involved in all the stresses and strains are well drawn and convincing. It's tough reading, but the humanity shines through."
Eli Cranor is a former professional football player and coached high school football for five years. He lives with his wife and children in Arkansas, where he is a high school teacher. His fiction has appeared in the "Missouri Review" and the "Greensboro Review," and his sports-themed advice column, "Athletic Support," appears weekly in newspapers across the country.
Says Soho Press Publisher Bronwen Hruska, "Peter Lovesey is the king of the tough-to-crack puzzle mystery, hands down, but I would argue he is also one of the most prolific and accomplished mystery writers of all time. It's been my great privilege to publish this highly decorated author on our Soho Crime list. But the even greater privilege has been in calling this funny, humble, generous man a friend. I am thrilled to celebrate Peter's fiftieth anniversary of crime writing by announcing the winner of Soho's First Crime Novel Contest. If Eli Cranor goes on to accomplish even a fraction of what Peter has, he will have had a storied career indeed."
Peter Lovesey will present the First Novel Award to Eli Cranor on Friday, December 4th, at a virtual 50th Anniversary Gala hosted by Murder by the Book, the Houston independent bookstore. Other speakers at the Gala, which will be open to the public, include Louise Penny, Jeffery Deaver, Peter Robinson, Lawrence Block, and Cara Black. The 50th Anniversary Gala begins at 6:00 pm CST. Event details can be found here: https://www.murderbooks.com/lovesey
Read the full story at https://www.prweb.com/releases/eli_cranor_s_don_t_know_tough_wins_the_peter_lovesey_first_crime_novel_contest_presented_by_soho_crime/prweb17580389.htm
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"Eli Cranor's 'Don't Know Tough' wins the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest presented by Soho Crime." PRWeb Newswire, 2 Dec. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A643494472/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7fea247. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “Friday Night Darks.”
Cranor, Eli DON'T KNOW TOUGH Soho Crime (Fiction None) $24.95 3, 8 ISBN: 978-1-641-29345-7
A high school football player and his coach struggle to survive the violence-strewn path to the Arkansas state championship.
Nobody, including himself, thinks that Billy Lowe is the star his brother Ricky was. Before he flamed out in a haze of alcohol and failing grades, Ricky was quarterback for the Denton Pirates; Billy's just a running back. But the abuse he suffers at the hands of Travis Rodney, his mother's lover of five years, and his obsessive comparisons of himself to his brother fuel both an unflinching determination to win and a rage that erupts without warning on and off the field. After Billy hits Austin Murphy so hard during practice that the well-connected sophomore is out five minutes with a concussion, Don Bradshaw, the school principal, draws up a list of conditions Billy will have to meet before he can take the field again. As if on cue, Trent Powers, the coach who considers Arkansas a purgatory to which the yearslong failure of the Fernando Valley Jaguars sent him from California, rips up most of the conditions because he can't afford to lose the championship. Neither can his grimly supportive wife, Marley, the most sharply drawn character in a first novel bristling with dangerous energy. When Trent and assistant coach Bull Kennedy find Travis beaten to death, everyone assumes that Billy has finally turned on his tormentor. But Trent, who took Billy into his home when his mother, Tina, vamoosed with his baby brother, doubles down on his ability to offer the boy salvation, and Lorna, Trent's teenage daughter, makes Billy her personal project. You can just imagine how well everyone's plans for escape turn out.
Friday Night Darks.
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"Cranor, Eli: DON'T KNOW TOUGH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A688199762/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a2436b3. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “crackle of Cranor’s electric prose,” “buzz is growing for this superb debut.”
* Don't Know Tough. By Eli Cranor. Mar. 2022.336P. Soho, $24.95 (9781641293457); e-book, $14.95 (9781641293464).
The comparison to Friday Night Lights will jump out at readers of this hard-as-nails debut thriller, but, in fact, beyond the thematic link to high-school football, the two stories live in very different worlds. In the celebrated TV show, there is a sense of possibility; in Cranor's novel, as in the best genuine noirs, there is only inevitability: "What has been started cannot stop. Not until it's over." Billy Lowe, a rampaging running back for the Denton, Arkansas, Pirates, lives in a trailer with his alcoholic mother and her out-of-control, abusive boyfriend, Travis, who drinks NyQuil to "save his whiskey up." Billy finds an outlet for his ever-simmering rage on the football field, but his bursts of violence go beyond even girdiron tolerance levels, like the time he puts a teammate in a wheelchair during the dreaded Blood Alley drill. Naturally, when Travis turns up dead in the family trailer, the eyes of Denton fall on Billy. Enter Billy's coach, Trent Powers, whose peculiar idealism, stirred into a volatile brew with a shot of born-again religion and his own dark past, leads him on a crusade to save his star. We know the trajectory the story will follow (down, always down), but that doesn't lessen the crackle of Cranor's electric prose, nor does it make his characters any less unequivocally real, their fates any less heartbreaking. --Bill Ott
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The buzz is growing for this superb debut, winner of the Peter Lovesey Best First Crime Novel contest.
YA: The high-school football setting will draw teens comfortable with the novel's bone-deep noir shading. BO.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "Don't Know Tough." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 14, 15 Mar. 2022, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A699285198/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f691ef29. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE" “Readers will be curious to see what Cranor does next.”
Don't Know Tough
Eli Cranor. Soho Crime, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-64129-345-7
Trent Powers, the hero of Cranor's arresting debut, and his family move from California to Denton, Ark., where Trent has been hired to coach the Pirates, the town's high school football team. The Pirates make it to the playoffs, though things sour when star player Billy Lowe, who shares a trailer with his single mother, hits rich kid Austin Murphy too hard in practice, putting the coach in a bind on whether to play or bench Billy and placing him at odds with his wife, who's desperate to get back to California. Meanwhile, home life in the Lowes' trailer falls apart when Billy knocks out Travis Rodney, his mother's abusive boyfriend. The discovery of Travis's rotting body a week later raises the stakes. Ctanor builds tension by shifting between third person and Billy's first-person account as the idealistic Trent contends with some powerful locals whose values are at odds with his own. Evocative prose is a plus ("Arkansas hills produce crazy like the Earth's mantle produces diamonds: enough heat and pressure to make all things hard"). Readers will be curious to see what Cranor does next. Agent: Alexa Stark, Trident Media. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"Don't Know Tough." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 2, 10 Jan. 2022, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690146741/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c2a6e03c. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “Cranor’s debut is a searing exploration of the toxic heart of Southern high school football culture.”
Cranor, Eli. Don't Know Tough. Soho Crime. Mar. 2022.336p. ISBN 9781641293457.
$24.95. M
Billy Lowe is the best running back the Denton High School Pirates have seen in years, and he could be their ticket to the coveted Arkansas state football championship. Years of abuse at the hands of Travis Rodney, his mother's boyfriend, have hardened Billy, and his reaction to anything that frustrates him is violence. The Pirates' coach, Trent Powers, has his own troubled past. Trent's own football coach provided him with a path out of abusive foster homes when he was a teenager; now Trent wants to lift Billy from the cycle of poverty and abuse that has plagued the Lowe family. When Travis is found dead, there are many suspects; clues point to Billy, whose volatile temper and violent outbursts are well known, but the truth is darker and more complex. VERDICT Cranor's debut is a searing exploration of the toxic heart of Southern high school football culture, including the human price of winning at all costs; think Friday Night Lights with extra darkness. Readers of Daniel Woodrell and Allen Eskens will appreciate the visceral detail in this Ozarks noir.--Nanette Donohue
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"Don't Know Tough." Library Journal, vol. 147, no. 3, Mar. 2022, pp. 121+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696081778/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6f32d26c. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “escalates with the fury of Greek tragedy in Cranor’s fact-based thriller,”
Cranor, Eli OZARK DOGS Soho Crime (Fiction None) $26.95 4, 4 ISBN: 9781641294539
A feud between Arkansas families escalates with the fury of Greek tragedy in Cranor's fact-based thriller.
Just because 17-year-old Joanna Fitzjurls has lost the competition for Homecoming Queen is no reason why she shouldn't take advantage of the uncharacteristically late curfew her grandfather and guardian, Jeremiah Fitzjurls, has allowed her, and she decides to go all the way with her sort-of-boyfriend, quarterback Colt Dillard. But Colt turns out to be just as inexperienced as she is, and while he's in the bathroom preparing for round two, she takes off on her own. She's quickly picked up by White supremacist skinhead Evail Ledford, who's recently agreed with Guillermo Torres to swap 50 pounds of meth for each American girl Evail can deliver. Evail takes particular pleasure in bagging Jo, because her father, Tommy, is doing time for shooting Evail's brother, Rudnick, and crushing his remains in the trunk of a car in the Fitzjurls family junkyard. Tommy had claimed in court that he was defending the property from a trespasser, but he wasn't any more successful with a jury than Jo was in her nomination for Homecoming Queen. As Craven County Sheriff Mona McNabb, who has a checkered family history of her own, does everything she can to head off a climax as scarifying as it is inevitable, Cranor reveals more and more details about the two families' history until it's clear that Jo's ordeals aren't just an outrage; they're the latest echo of a generational tragedy.
Family loyalty, young love, honoring the dead--they're all here, and they all go terribly wrong.
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"Cranor, Eli: OZARK DOGS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A735118057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3d0c133a. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “author has a superior gift for capturing the cadences and feel of Southern small towns.”
Ozark Dogs
Eli Cranor. Soho Crime, $26.95 (312p) ISBN 978-1-64129-453-9
Fully realized characters lift Cranor's grim second novel (after 2()22's Don't Know Tough). A dispute over a woman led Tom Fitzjurls to kill Rudnick Ledford by shooting him in the back. The open-andshut case landed Tom in prison, sentenced to life without parole. That left his father, Jeremiah, a Vietnam vet who operates a car junkyard in Taggard, Ark., to raise Tom's infant daughter, Jo, after she was abandoned by her mother. Now a high school senior, Jo is chafing to escape her guardian's tight restrictions on her social life, even as Jeremiah struggles with accepting that she'll be moving on. Meanwhile, Rud's brother, Evail, a meth dealer, ex-con, and white supremacist who narrowly avoided being killed at the same time as his sibling, believes he's found the perfect way to get revenge on the Fitzjurls family. Evail's threat to Jo forces Jeremiah, who was nicknamed the Judge during his tour of duty for his marksmanship, to team up with several allies he doesn't fully trust to protect her. The author has a superior gift for capturing the cadences and feel of Southern small towns. Greg Iles fans will be eager for Cranor's next. Agent: David Hale Smith. Ink Well Management. (Apr.)
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"Ozark Dogs." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 6, 6 Feb. 2023, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A737971756/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=05a10475. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: "Cranor has transformed a familiar noir theme into a multidimensional tragedy of great power and beauty.”
Ozark Dogs. By Eli Cranor. Apr. 2023. Soho, $26.95 (9781641294539); e-book (9781641294546).
Cranor follows his dynamite first novel, Don't Know Tough (2022), with another scorching country noir, this one about two feuding families in a small Ozark town. It's the Fitzjurls vs. the Ledfords, but this is no garden-variety squabble. As former Vietnam sniper Jeremiah Fitzjurl attempts to explain to his granddaughter, Joanna, "Beyond that door were bloodlines and violence that ran deeper than the limestone caves burrowing their way through the Ozarks." So, naturally, Jeremiah attempts to keep the door closed, all but imprisoning high-school senior Joanna in the junkyard home where they live. But Joanna, whose father is languishing in the penitentiary after killing one of the Ledfords, is not one to be contained, and so begins the conflagration that this bloodiest of blood feuds (don't forget, there's a sniper in the mix) has been building toward for years. Yes, there is a Romeo and Juliet angle here, but there are deeply hidden secrets, too, secrets that have spawned festering sores that long ago turned malignant. And, above all, there is not one character on either side of the family divide who doesn't bring the reader up short by displaying an unexpected layer of complexity--and even, sometimes, compassion. In only his second novel, Cranor has transformed a familiar noir theme into a multidimensional tragedy of great power and beauty.--Bill Ott
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Ott, Bill. "Ozark Dogs." Booklist, vol. 119, no. 16, 15 Apr. 2023, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747135394/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7f8675c5. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “brutal conditions in the chicken plant would make Upton Sinclair proud.” “winner by a rising star of Southern noir.”
Cranor, Eli. Broiler. Soho Crime. Jul. 2024. 336p. ISBN 9781641295901. $27.95. SUSPENSE
Edgar winner Cranor (Ozark Dogs; Don't Know Tough) returns with a timely thriller that shines a light on the hidden and of-ten-demonized underclass of immigrant meat-packing workers who keep the United States fed. Gabriela and her boyfriend Edwin have worked as undocumented laborers at Luke Jackson's chicken plant in northwest Arkansas for seven years, processing thousands of broilers a day for little pay and no bathroom breaks. While Gabby plans for a future far beyond Detmer Foods, Luke strives for a coveted promotion, and his wife Mimi tends to their infant son and her growing postpartum depression. These two couples, who might as well occupy different universes for how rarely they interact, are brought into sudden and violent conflict when Luke fires Edwin to impress his higher-ups, leading Edwin to hatch a desperate scheme that will allow him and Gabby to truly begin their lives together. Edwin's act of revenge is unforgivable, but Cranor's ability to find the humanity in all his characters will keep readers from losing sympathy, and his unshakable depiction of the brutal conditions in the chicken plant would make Upton Sinclair proud. VERDICT A third winner by a rising star of Southern noir.--Michael Pucci
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Pucci, Michael. "Broiler." Library Journal, vol. 149, no. 5, May 2024, p. 78. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793818824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=244fa16a. Accessed 24 May 2024.
QUOTE: “The string of felonies can’t compete with the chicken-plucking background for intensity and horror.”
Cranor, Eli BROILER Soho Crime (Fiction None) $27.95 7, 2 ISBN: 9781641295901
A kidnapping throws the lives of several people attached to an Arkansas chicken-rendering plant wildly out of control, even as it echoes the brutalizing rhythms of their ordinary lives.
Ever since her parents brought her into the country from Mexico, Gabriela Menchaca's never had it easy. Her job as a chicken plucker at Detmer Foods is physically grueling and emotionally draining. She and her partner, Edwin Saucedo, are three months behind in their trailer-park rent. The two of them have worked so many overtime shifts that Detmer Foods now owes them $50,000 Gabby never expects to see. And her inability to take bathroom breaks at work forced her to deprive herself of the water that would have kept her pregnancy years ago from turning tragic. When Edwin arrives two minutes late for work one morning and is summarily fired by Luke Jackson, he seizes Tucker, the plant manager's 6-month-old baby, and flees, demanding a ransom of $50,000 for his return. Jackson doesn't go to the police because he's afraid to jeopardize his imminent promotion to executive officer of poultry. But he does rise far enough above his belief that "secrets were the secret to a happy marriage" to tell his wife, Mimi, that he's convinced that the man he just fired is behind the abduction and that he's taken an appropriate revenge. Although the mounting complications eventually stall, leaving all the leading characters flailing dangerously about, one dominant pattern emerges: Mimi, who's just discovered her husband's infidelity, perversely bonds with Gabby as the two women struggle to reckon with the ways they've been victimized by the men they love.
The string of felonies can't compete with the chicken-plucking background for intensity and horror.
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Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Cranor, Eli: BROILER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537170/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fd80a49d. Accessed 24 May 2024.