The San Antonio native's “Nothing to Lose” is a mystery novel set in Beaumont where Sanderson, chair of Lamar University's Department of English and Modern Languages, has long taught writing. The story collection “Trashy Behavior” is primarily set in Odessa, where he was a college instructor for seven years before that.
Sanderson evokes the names of other Texas writers — Tom Pilkington, J. Frank Dobie and Billy Lee Brammer — who saw the state as a borderland with a mindset focused on the “end of things.”
“Within 200 miles in much of any direction you're almost in a different state,” he said. “The geography changes, the culture even changes a little.
“Odessa has a Westerness to it, a Southwesterness. People are laconic and slow-talking. They accept things. In East Texas there's a sense of irony. Life is tough, and there's a tough, mean God out there.”
Sanderson's Beaumont is the land of the three P's: pine, petroleum and Pentecostals, where the claustrophobia of the swampland and the oppressive heat conspire to push the “Baptists behind gated communities to avoid sin, while the Pentecostals are not afraid to testify,” he said.
His East Texas is a Southern gothic world with hints of Flannery O'Connor and Joe Lansdale.
“There's an old saying that things in West Texas can kill you, but in East Texas they just make you wish you were dead.”
Both books are gritty and real with stories steered by those who are on the margins of society.
In “Nothing to Lose,” Roger Jackson is a small-time private eye who spends most of his free time at the Nothing to Lose bar, which is a mangled version of East Texas native Janis Joplin's famous lyric (as written by Kris Kristofferson): “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.”
It's a theme that flows through Sanderson's work: The people who are on the edges of society. He writes in the novel that “we didn't duck life, as our social and financial betters did, but we were very wary of it. We knew, eventually, life would just beat us down.”
Sanderson's fictional worlds abound with potential.
“I'm writing about the losers, the ne'er-do-wells, the people who almost, could of, maybe done it,” he said. “I'm always attracted to those stories, those people. It's one reason I don't like superheroes. I don't like people who are all-powerful.”
In “Trashy Behavior,” that includes a prostitute turned bar owner with a gripping story behind the scar that snakes across her face. That story and a few others from the book set in the Odessa oil boom and bust years of the late '70s and early '80s are being reworked into another novel on the horizon.
In the '60s San Antonio-set story “Bankers,” inspired by his part-time bank jobs while in high school and later at what was then Southwest Texas State University, Sanderson writes of a teen who is “mostly waiting on my future to find me” but is instead thrust into danger.
“In most of my stories, a character has to confront something,” he said. The collection's strongest story may well be the gripping Western “Comancheria,” in which a boy Sanderson describes as being potentially autistic gets caught among the languages of his German immigrant family, the Comanches who brutally capture him and the English-speaking soldiers who save him. Back home in school “not only did he not trust the Deutsch and American words ... but he distrusted what the words meant.”
Joe O'Connell is a Texas writer.
A San Antonio mystery
Jim Sanderson grew up in San Antonio dreaming of escape. Today he's on the short list of accomplished authors who most effectively evoke the city's essence.
His latest literary mystery, “Dolph's Team,” opens with a group of middle-aged men drinking beer and telling lies at a South Side ice house. One of them is murdered in the restroom, and the crew set out to right the wrong with nothing but a Taser, their reading glasses, a few beers and a lot of reminiscing about a city constantly evolving.
“There are in fact three San Antonios to me,” said Sanderson, 58, a writing professor at Lamar University in Beaumont. “The first is the town that I remember. It is a part of me. It is vivid, even if my memory is faulty — thus, I can remember it like I want to. The second is the historic San Antonio. I don't mean just the big incidents of the city, but its growth into what it is today. The third is the nearly million-population city of today.”
“Dolph's Team,” about a group of aging friends from both sides of the law investigating the (seemingly) cut-and-dried murder of a friend, is the fourth Sanderson mystery. He's also an accomplished short story writer, and many of the characters in the new novel also appear both in his other mysteries and his most recent story collection “Faded Love.” A recurring theme is the almosts of life, or, as writer-turned-bug-exterminator Walter tells the reader: “the importance of what could have happened.”
“At writers' conferences,” says Sanderson, “we talk about how the publishing world has changed — or has died. Self-pity and gallows humor are served at these conferences as desert. So I'm always reminded that I'm an aging/outsider/loser. But I think that this disenchantment is a part of growing up. I think that we all feel that way. I just like to write about characters who really are aging outsiders who've missed their opportunities.”
His recurring characters give his collective work a view of how lives evolve.
“I'm confirming what I first thought about fiction: It is the best medium for dealing with time, showing the past and present working simultaneously,” he said. “So in my stories, no matter how long they are, I try to show that my characters have a future — in terms of their hopes, ambitions, loves — and a past, but are stuck in the present of the story.”
Sanderson cites as a major writing influence the late Three Rivers native James Crumley for his twisting of tried-and-true mystery conventions, and for his sense of place.
San Antonio is indeed a character in “Dolph's Team.” The character Rodney Lee, a city councilman dreaming of being the city's first black mayor, epitomizes the ambition of a poor boy from the East Side. Meanwhile, Dolph, Walter and crew watched Southtown evolve into a trendy spot for artists. Sanderson's San Antonio clearly evokes his South Side upbringing.
“There was a mixture of ethnicities, races and income levels,” he said. “But we were united in feeling that we were outshone by the North Side. We weren't the cool kids. We didn't have the cool stuff. We mocked our ethnicities and our backgrounds, but the mocking was adolescent games. And I think that we came out of that time seeing those problems as the source of games or humor. Thus we couldn't take the prejudices that we grew up among seriously.”
Joe O'Connell is an Austin-based freelance writer.
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