Marcie Rendon was in her mid-60s when her first novel, Murder on the Red River, was published in 2017. She had written for the theater, plus a couple of children’s books, and her bio line also describes her as a “community arts activist,” but nothing she’d done up to that point would have suggested she was about to embark on what Louise Erdrich—the doyenne of Native American novelists—has described as an “addictive and authentically Native crime series propelled by the irresistible Cash Blackbear, a warm, sad, funny, and intuitive Ojibwe woman.”
Murder on the Red River was followed by Girl Gone Missing (2019), Sinister Graves (2022), and—just out—Broken Fields. “I want a shelf of Cash Blackbear novels,” Erdrich wrote, and her wish is being fulfilled. In addition, When We Last Saw Her—a novel not part of the series—was published last year. If, like me, you routinely read a lot of crime fiction and a slew of books having to do with Native Americans, you should check out Murder on the Red River at the earliest opportunity. If you find yourself zipping through it, as I did, you will relish the series as a whole, as I do; if not, not.
There’s a lot of overlap from one book to the next, as is common in fiction of this kind, but here in particular, even more so. In the first novel, set around 1970, Cash is 19-years old—about the same age Rendon herself would have been at the time. Certain recurring memories haunt her. “Back when she was three,” we read early in the first book, “her mother had rolled the car—with her three kids in it—in the big ditch north of town.” Her mother seems to be okay right after the accident, but she dies and the family is broken up, the three kids separated.
“After that night came a succession of white foster homes.” This becomes a drumbeat in the series—not just the experience of Cash and her siblings but the unmitigated evil, as Rendon frames it, of white families raising Indian children. And that in turn becomes evidence of a larger pattern of white perfidy and hypocrisy, especially among churchgoing people. “Cash didn’t like the word god,” we read on the very first page of the first book in the series.
As someone who prays every day, more than ever now in old age and as a reader who has known exemplary foster parents over the years, I see our common world from a perspective quite different from Rendon’s. But that doesn’t at all prevent me from learning from this series and relishing its remarkable protagonist, at once down-to-earth and visionary. Nor do the occasional glitches in the text, which an editor should have fixed as a matter of course. (Example: p. 108, “Overwhelming sadness enveloped the space around her”; p. 215, “Loneliness, although Cash didn’t know the word to describe how she felt, enveloped her.”)
I haven’t yet mentioned Wheaton, an important presence in his own right, whose connection with Cash goes all the way back to the car accident when she was three-years old and he was a young cop. By the time of Broken Fields, he’s the county sheriff. He’s steady, unassuming, a bit awkward at times but not to be trifled with, and his role in the new book is the novelistic equivalent of an Oscar-winning performance as Best Supporting Actor.
Rendon’s ability to evoke the fields and the towns, the pool joints and the long highways of the Red River Valley, gives Broken Fields a grounding in the everyday real. Less persuasive is her rendering of the novel’s heart of darkness, a prim white church lady who is not only lubricious, but also a killer with a psychotic streak. Who knew? (Cash did. “Never know what these church ladies are capable of,” she observes early on.) The odious county social worker, Miss Dackson, is the same one who was on the job when Cash entered the system as a toddler after her mother’s death.
But there are new ingredients too, including an unconventional trio of bank robbers. Many readers will relish Jonesy, an “old Indian woman who knew something about otherworldly types of things,” as Cash herself does (subject to visions she takes seriously). “Jonesy, wearing men’s jeans and a red flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up to her elbows, was swinging a long-handled ax overhead in the yard out front. A two-foot log split in half as she brought the ax down with a resounding smack.”
I’m sure I’m not the only one who hopes that Rendon, if not swinging a long-handled axe herself, will give us at least two or three more Cash Blackbear books. May it be so.
Broken Fields: A Cash Blackbear Mystery
by Marcie R. Rendon
Soho Crime, 272 pp., $28.95
John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, The American Conservative, and other outlets
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