Novelist and screenwriter Attica Locke has lived in Los Angeles for 20 years but she thinks she’ll probably be writing about her hometown Houston and the Gulf Coast region for the rest of her life.

Locke’s first novel, Black Water Rising, was set in Houston in the 1980s and her recently published second novel, The Cutting Season, takes place on a restored Louisiana plantation in 2009. In my interview with the author before her trip home this month, she explained she is one of those writers whose early environment continues to have great influence on her creative work.

“There’s something about the Gulf Coast and Houston and Texas that is stamped on my psyche, and I view the world through the lens in which I was raised and am hoping to hold on to some of the great things about the way I was raised,” she says.

Locke is the daughter of former city attorney and 2009 mayoral candidate Gene Locke. On Monday, the Lockes will have a bit of a public family reunion as both are set to speak at the University of Houston Political Science Department event: "Revolution on Cullen: The Personal Challenges of Integrating UH in the 1960s." Over the next few days Attica Locke will also be making bookstore appearances to read from her new novel.

The Cutting Season, though plotted as a murder mystery, is a novel that wrestles with the question of how we comprehend and make peace with our individual and national history. The novel’s reluctant detective, Caren Gray, manages the Belle Vie plantation in its 21st-century form, as an event and conference venue.

Gray’s life, and the novel, is filled with ironies of history. The successful Gray was two years into Tulane Law School before financial considerations set her into hotel management, but she is also the daughter of the Belle Vie’s former cook and the great, great granddaughter of slaves who worked the plantation. Meanwhile, the father of her own daughter, Morgan, works for the Obama White House.

Her set life is completely upset when the body of Inés Avalo, an undocumented El Salvadorian migrant worker, who toiled in the nearby sugar cane fields, is found on the Belle Vie grounds. Only by unraveling the tangled histories of Belle Vie and her own individual past does Gray manage to solve the two murders separated by more than a century.

The inspiration for the novel came when Locke and her husband attended a wedding at the real Louisiana plantation, Oak Alley. The magnificent beauty of the house and grounds juxtaposed with its ugly history left Locke unsettled but gave her much material for a novel. When I asked her if writing the book helped her to answer some of the questions the experience had left her with, she said not quite.

“What I got out of writing the book was coming face to face with my own personal ancestral history and finding peace with that, but also deciding which parts of my history am I going to carry forward in my life and give to my children and which parts of the idea of what it means to be black in America that we’ve known up until the 21st century am I going to let go of. Writing it was kind of an act of healing,” she explained.

Part of that healing came in the from a gratitude she felt for all those who labored before her so she could live in “this incredible life of freedom.”

“I also felt a sense of pride, not only in black people, but in my country. My God, look at what this country has done. Look at the breadth of progress. It’s just kind of awesome to think of the ways in which America has the capacity of self correction when we are at our best,” she says.

Creating Mystery

While Cutting Season is loaded with complex issues and themes, it is also a well plotted satisfying murder mystery. Explaining how she achieves such a balance in her work, Locke says, “The murder mystery element keeps me from going off on tangents with those big American themes. If you leave a body on page three, you have to keep things moving along.”

At the same time, Locke acknowledges the importance of writing a mystery novel that contains more than just a crime to be solved.

“The other thing about having sophisticated character studies behind the mystery is if someone figures out what the mystery, I still want them to finish reading the book. To me every mystery, on some level, is Scooby-Doo. It’s the first guy to walk by in the first chapter or whatever. There’s only so many ways you can fool people, but at least you can add all this other rich stuff that keeps people reading anyway,” she explains.

Jay vs. Gene

When Locke returns to Houston she is also set to revisit her character, Houston attorney Jay Porter, in a sort of sequel to her first novel Black Water Rising. Jay, like Caren, is an example of Locke’s interest in creating “regular people” who are “presented with extraordinary circumstances” that place them in the role of amateur detective.

The new book will take place during an election in Houston, and since the character of Jay shares some qualities and life achievements as her father Gene Locke, Attica Locke will likely have to continue to explain to people that Jay is not Gene.

“People who really know my dad, know that Jay’s not him, and I can’t control the rest of it. My dad has been a good sport. He never gave me a hard time once,” she says and then adds “Other than paying for college and giving me braces, one of the greatest thing he’s ever done as a father is not giving me a hard time about that. . .He never said anything. He just completely supported me.”

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Attica Locke will read at Brazos Bookstore on Tuesday and Blue Willow Bookshop on Wednesday.