A Tribute: A Guest Post by Ron Currie
Pushcart Prize-winning author Ron Currie turns his pen to hard-boiled crime in this immersive story. A ruthless matriarch with a small town at her disposal, Babs Dionne is a character you won’t soon forget — and one you’ll want to talk about with everyone you know. Read on for an exclusive essay from Ron Currie on writing The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne.
Hardcover
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$29.00
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne
By Ron Currie
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.00
$29.00
When crime matriarch Babs Dionne’s youngest daughter is found dead, she will stop at nothing to uncover the truth—or get her revenge.
When crime matriarch Babs Dionne’s youngest daughter is found dead, she will stop at nothing to uncover the truth—or get her revenge.
Once when I was maybe 7 or 8, my grandmother put a cat in a clothes dryer and turned it on. She was attempting—one would argue successfully—to make a point.
I mention this to illustrate the fact that, while my grandmother was not a criminal—at least as far as any of us know—she was pretty gangster. Which is why she served as the template for the character of Babs Dionne, the eponymous crime boss at the center of my new series of novels (and yes, the dryer incident will happen in the second book; don’t worry, it has a [mostly] happy ending for the cat).
We were Franco-American, which meant, among other things, that most everyone spoke French and barely had the proverbial pot to piss in or the window to throw it out of. The neighborhood I grew up in was its own little world, a stronghold of Francohood for more than a hundred years, but by the time I came along the culture (centered around labor, language, and church) was unraveling. Francos had been pressured from pretty much the moment they got here to assimilate and Anglicize and abandon who and what they came from. And so they did. My father didn’t speak English until he went to school, and I don’t speak a lick of French.
This never sat well with me. And as I got older I longed to memorialize the culture I’d grown up in, before my memories of it became too fuzzy to be useful. But good stories don’t start with ideas or memories or wishes—they start with characters. To write about where I came from, I needed a character who, unlike most of us Francos in real life, defended the culture and the language tooth and claw. And I wanted this character to be, in certain ways, a tribute to my grandmother. Thus, Babs was born.
Babs is as hard a person as you’re ever going to encounter—but she also, like so many Franco women I knew, has molten love where her bone marrow’s supposed to be. She loves her family and her people and her neighborhood so fiercely that she’ll do anything to protect them. And she can just as easily cut you with her tongue as she can with the knives she keeps in her belt.
My grandmother’s been gone more than thirty years now. And while I can’t raise the dead and I can’t turn back time, I can conjure worlds with words, and in doing so bring back into existence both the spirit of my grandmother and the neighborhood that was, in my mind, synonymous with her. Babs made that possible, and as such, I love Babs as much as you can love someone who doesn’t actually exist. And I can’t wait for you to meet her.