Crime and college football, a glorious pairing
Talking with Eli Cranor, author of the fine new college football thriller 'Mississippi Blue 42'
Hey friends! I’ve got a TV show and (very soon) a new book out in the world, and I’d love for you to check ‘em out. Watch “Home Turn,” my show with NASCAR Studios, right here. And prepare for the arrival of IRON IN THE BLOOD, the story of the Alabama-Auburn rivalry, dropping Aug. 26. More details here, pre-order below.
Two years ago, I was walking around the tiny north Georgia town of Blairsville during their Memorial Day festival. My father had passed away barely a week before, and I was still wandering through the days in a haze of grief and disbelief. And then the little band set up on the town square happened to start jamming on “Country Roads,” one of my dad’s favorite songs and one of the last we played for him, and I flinched right there in the street like I’d been burned.
(This post gets much more fun, promise!)
I ducked into a local indie bookstore and looked for something, anything to distract my mind. My eyes fell on a book called Ozark Dogs, by a cat named Eli Cranor — rural Southern noir, hard-edged crime, generational conflict, exactly the kind of book and genre I love. I bought the book right then and there, tore through it a few hours later, and I’ve been a devoted Cranor-phile ever since.
So imagine my delight, then, when I found out that Eli’s latest book, Mississippi Blue 42, centers on college football, a sport I happen to know a thing or two about. Set in the days just before NIL and the transfer portal upended the sport, Mississippi Blue 42 involves everything you’d want out of a college football thriller: quarterback battles, wild college-town parties, psychopathic boosters, string-pulling behind-the-scenes power brokers, federal agents, and cash — so, so much cash. Oh, and Waffle House, too. Can’t ever forget the Waffle House.
“My end goal for this book always was twofold,” Eli says. “On one hand, I wanted people who had any sort of questions about NIL1, which is such a big talking point to anybody that I talk to about college football right now. I wanted them, if they read this, to then be able to say, Oh, okay, maybe I have a better understanding now … But at the same time, I didn't want to try and tear college football all the way down. I've attributed so much of my success and my personality and different things about me to things that I learned playing the game.”
Some authors learn their craft by spending long nights in libraries, others by observing the human condition spending long nights in bars. Cranor took a different path, up and down the football fields of the world, starting when he was just a little kid growing up in Arkansas.
“When I was in third grade, they used to put those strips of athletic tape across your helmet and write your name on them,” he recalls. “My dad wrote MAD DOG, all caps, across my helmet.”
He started out at linebacker, then moved to quarterback in seventh grade, a position he’d play the rest of his long career. He played one season at Florida Atlantic under the legendary Howard Schnellenberger, then finished up at a Division II Ouachita Baptist. He carved his name in the Ouachita record books; many of his marks still stand today.
He faced the usual challenge of football players who reach the end of their playing days — what now? — but found a brief salvation from an unexpected source.
“I was a strange duck,” he says. “I had double-majored in political science and English Literature, and was also the university’s quarterback. And when I graduated, I had a bunch of applications out trying to get into an MFA program for creative writing. And all of a sudden, of all the damn things, I get a Facebook message…”
Long story short, the Carlstad Crusaders in Carlstad, Sweden wanted him to serve as both quarterback and offensive coordinator. Cranor led them to a title, and then made preparations to play for a team in Cannes called the Iron Mask. (Euro teams have so much better names than ours.)
But on a break after the Crusaders’ season, Facebook again redirected Cranor’s life. An old classmate ‘Liked’ a new photo of Cranor with a haircut, he reached out to her … and now they’re a family.
Eli spent the next five years coaching high school football, including a stint at head coach that gave him all the fuel, motivation and inspiration he could possibly need for an eventual writing career.
“I was young and dumb and had been very successful as a coordinator,” he says. “What I didn’t realize was that the position of a head high school football coach in a small town in Arkansas was like being a youth pastor, a used car salesman, the mayor and the sheriff, all wrapped up into one role. And man, it just about killed me. And that’s a literal statement.”
The lessons he learned, both on and off the field, powered him forward in the next stage of his career. A longtime reader of Southern literary legends like William Faulkner (who inspired many of the names of the fictional university and town in Mississippi Blue 42), Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Harry Crews and Jesmyn Ward, he threw himself into writing with the same passion he’d once thrown himself into defensive alignments.
“Football had literally guided my life since that MAD DOG tape in third grade,” he says. “I needed a hill to climb. I needed something to go after. And I just started getting up at five o’clock. It took about seven years, but the driving force was to find something like what football had been.”
He wrote several very bad novels, ones that no one will ever see — been there, brother — before breaking through with “Don’t Know Tough,” a tale of judgment, retribution and high school football. Two novels later, and he was ready to bring Mississippi Blue 42 to light.
He credits a famous SB Nation expose from 2014 — “Meet the Bag Man,” by Steven Godfrey — with helping to shape the narrative, along with other investigations into the cash-only underworld of college athletics. Mississippi Blue 42 blends that small-town community feel with the billions in revenue and the recruiting combined with a bit of artistic license. Oh, and he topped it all off with a female protagonist — Rae Johnson, an FBI special agent who just happens to be the daughter of a well-known Southern football coach.
“It was a big chance to take a female lead,” Eli says. “But the thing is, dudes don’t read books! They don’t read novels, especially. So Rae was our hope — if there are women who are invested in college football, that this would be a niche for them as well.”
I hate spoiling even any details of a book, so I’ll just say that Mississippi Blue 42 features everything you could want in a good Southern crime thriller, set to the beat of a college football marching band. You definitely should check it out … and plan now for the followup, Blood Orange Fall. (The manuscript is already done!)
Here’s Eli’s own promo for the book, with some bonus footage showing that he’s still got the ol’ cannon:
“Mississippi Blue 42 is about fictionalizing and dramatizing the moment the Band-Aid (of NIL) comes off. The second book is about living in a world where the Band-Aid is off, living in a world where there are no rules,” Eli says, noting that the parallels to our current political situation are obvious and deliberate. “Everything is out in the open now. How do you still play the game, whether it's the political game or whether it's the game of football?”
With a job as Writer-in-Residence at Arkansas Tech, Cranor is now locked into a book-a-year rate, and the switch from football to writing suits him just fine.
“It’s a lot easier on the knees, but I don’t know if it’s easier on the brain,” he laughs. “People ask me, ‘Do you wish you were still coaching?’ I’m like, no, man, this writing life’s pretty cool.”
Buy Mississippi Blue 42 and all the other books I’ve recommended over at the official Flashlight & A Biscuit bookshop right here:
Song of the Week: Spoon, “The Underdog”
When we have a guest, we turn this section over to them, to give us a sense of their music tastes. Eli grew up listening to his dad’s favorite music — early Jimmy Buffett, John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Harry Chapin — and now, when he writes, he listens to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” over and over again. But as magnificent as that album is, it’s not really meant for the open road, you know? “If I’m on a road trip, if the Cranor crew is taking off for the Redneck Riviera,” he says, “then we’ll start that trip off on ‘The Underdog.’” Ten seconds in, you know why — the exuberance of the horn section and the bouncy acoustic-guitar strum just screams get out and see the world. Play it loud.
You can check out “The Underdog” and all our other recommendations at the official Flashlight & A Biscuit Spotify playlist, accept no store-brand imitations.
That’ll do it for this time around! Less than two weeks ‘til IRON IN THE BLOOD drops. Oh, you’ll be hearing plenty about it before then. Matter of fact, I managed to score an exclusive Q&A with the author coming right up …
—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia
This is issue #167 of Flashlight & A Biscuit. Check out all the past issues right here. Feel free to email me with your thoughts, tips and advice. If you’re new around here, jump right to our most-read stories, or check out some of our recent hits:
Home Turn, our new show for NASCAR Studios, is right here for you to watch:
Drinking beers at a serial killer’s last resort
My uncle knocked out Joe DiMaggio
Talking with Michael Farris Smith about Mississippi, the darkness and his new novel
Talking with Will Leitch on the occasion of his new novel
Our first documentary, on the famous Rama Jama’s diner in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
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For those not up to speed on the last few chaotic years in the sport, NIL is “Name/Image/Likeness,” allowing players to share in the revenues derived from the use of their name/image/likenesses, like in jerseys, advertisements or video games. The transfer portal allows players to switch universities without penalty. In other words, the players now can get paid for their efforts and go wherever they want — just like their coaches, just like every other student, just like literally everyone else in America. To say it’s been controversial is to say that a hurricane is a little puff of wind.
Just purchased his book and preordered yours!