The sharpshooter blues
Subtitle: a novel
By: by Lewis Nordan.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Chapel Hill, N.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 291
Subjects: Mississippi -- Fiction
Description: The first question this remarkable new tale of mayhem and misunderstanding asks is: Who is singing the Sharpshooter Blues? Is it Morgan, the teenage trick-shot artist, who stops by The William Tell grocery in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, one day to show off some fancy moves? Or is it Marshal Chisolm who enforces Law and Order? Or is it one of the two lovely children who pick the wrong country store to rob? Or is it maybe Hydro Raney, a sweet, simple boy who does the right thing and loses everything?

But the story asks a deeper question: Can the power of love hold up to the power of bullets? Don't expect an easy answer, for, as one Arrow Catcher citizen puts it, "You wouldn't want to hurt anybody, but when you were singing the blues...sometimes there was just nothing as satisfying as shooting a gun inside a house...it relieved stress, it cemented relationships, strangers or partners in marriage...it cleared the air.".

The Sharpshooter Blues is, in part, an exuberant meditation on America's love affair with blue-steel barrels and snub-nose bullets, and in part, a heartbreaking look at the violence and loss that ensue when the guns come out to play one day in a small town. But most of all, after the bullets have flown, it's a story of love - between fathers and sons, between husbands and wives, between gay lovers, and between longtime neighbors and friends.