Auburn’s Ace Atkins talks barbecue, blues and his new book

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Auburn’s Ace Atkins talks barbecue, blues and his new book

Updated: Jun. 25, 2024, 9:58 p.m.|Published: Jun. 25, 2024, 7:15 a.m.

9–12 minutes

Crime novelist and Alabama native Ace Atkins got his first taste of Memphis – its soulful music, its sinful food and its colorful cast of nocturnal characters – on a trip to the Bluff City during his senior year at Auburn University.

Atkins -- an AU football hero who, a couple months before, famously sacked Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel twice in the Tigers’ season-defining upset of the Gators -- had long been a fan of all those great Stax Records songs that emanated from Memphis, but he had never been to the place where they were recorded.

“This would have been December 1993,” Atkins recalls. “It was my senior watch banquet at Auburn and right before Christmas break. And I was like, ‘I just have to go to Memphis and see where all this stuff happened.’

“At that time, Stax Records had just been razed, so the old movie theater where they made all those recordings with Otis Redding and Sam & Dave and Booker T. & the M.G.’s, it was just bricks, just rubble. They were tearing it down to put up a soup kitchen or something.

“And I got some bricks and got some linoleum from the floor and went back to my hotel. It was almost like Stax had been erased from Memphis.

“I was in my hotel downtown, and there was a Christmas parade happening,” Atkins continues the story. “And I looked down, and the grand marshal of the Christmas parade was Rufus Thomas.

“He had been so forgotten about that I couldn’t believe he was still alive, and here he was the grand marshal. And I thought this is the best place, this is the greatest city. You’ve got Rufus Thomas leading the parade, you’ve got your great barbecue places downtown, you’ve got Elvis Presley.”

RELATED: Auburn’s Ace Atkins: From football hero to best-selling crime novelist

The prolific Atkins -- the author of 29 previous novels, including four in his early Nick Travers series, four true-crime novels, 11 in his Quinn Colson series and 10 in Robert B, Parker’s iconic Spenser franchise -- returns to Memphis (circa 2010) for more crime and hijinks, along with some international spy games, in his latest thriller, “Don’t Let the Devil Ride,” which releases today.

In it, Memphis housewife Addison McKellar hires legendary private investigator Porter Hayes (Atkins’ wink and nod to famed Stax musicians David Porter and Isaac Hayes) to help her find her husband, globetrotting businessman Dean McKellar, who has vanished without telling the family of his whereabouts.

With Porter’s help, Addison soon discovers that Dean McKellar is not only not the man he was pretending to be, but he is also mixed up with a ruthless cabal that would not think twice about coming after Addison and her children.

It’s not as dark and heavy as all that may sound, though. Like Atkins’ earlier novels, “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” is sprinkled with liberal doses of wicked humor throughout.

“The school of thought that I come from is people like Elmore Leonard and Charles Portis,” Atkins says. “You’ve got to have a sense of humor to look at the absurdities of life.

“So that’s really the thing I try to get across to readers,” he adds. “If they pick up the book, hopefully they’ll get some laughs.”

In 1993, during his senior season at Auburn, Ace Atkins sacked Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel two times to key the Tigers' upset of the Gators.(Birmingham News file photo)

We spoke with Atkins over the phone from his home in Oxford, Miss., a few weeks before his new book’s publication.

Here are some excerpts from that conversation. Both the questions and answers have been edited for brevity and context.

In an Instagram post, you said this is the biggest and most fun story you’ve ever written. Can you elaborate on that? I mean, it’s certainly sprawling in terms of geography and characters and themes, but tell us your thoughts on why you feel that way.

Well, for the last 10, 11 years, I’ve been writing two series. One of them was very much my own, set in Mississippi with Quinn Colson. And then writing about Boston and writing for Spenser. And I knew I had a really big book that I wanted to write, and it seemed like this was the time to do it.

You know, you have those projects that you want to take on, and I wanted to write something that was very Memphis but at the same time had a larger, globe-hopping component to it.

As much as I love crime novels, back when I was a kid, I used to love spy novels. I read Ian Fleming and John le Carré. That was really my gateway into crime fiction.

So I wanted a little bit of espionage . . . a big, globe-hopping, fun, international thriller that just happened to be set mainly up the road in Memphis.

So, is this something that has been percolating in your head for a while, even as far back as the Quinn Colson books?

Years ago, I guess this was around 2010, my editor, a guy named Neil Nyren, wanted me to start writing a series. He thought it would be good for me to create a series character.

We talked about it, and I had two ideas. And one of them was set in a very rural area and that was what became Quinn Colson. And the other idea I had was a very urban story set in Memphis, about a private detective named Porter Hayes. And these were two different kind of paths -- kind of like the city mouse versus the country mouse.

Ultimately, what drew me in was writing about Quinn Colson and writing about this fictional Mississippi county, but I always had that character, that detective, Porter Hayes, in mind. I just couldn’t quit thinking about him. He was always there.

And so, when I changed publishers -- I went from Putnam to William Morrow -- they were very interested in me doing a stand-alone story and me doing a big, weighty summer thriller. And I just knew that I had to have Porter Hayes in it.

The title, “Don’t Let the Devil Ride,” references an old gospel song, the kind of music that is right in your wheelhouse. What’s the backstory on that?

It’s funny because, once you write a book, there’s a lot of discussion over the cover and the title, and we went through a million different titles. I’m not kidding. It’s the longest process of all.

When I was revising the manuscript, I can’t remember if Porter says it or his colleague, Deacon Malone, says it, but he said, ‘Like the old song says, don’t let the devil ride,’ which is an old gospel standard that has been covered by all kinds of people.

And it just seemed very fitting for the title, and it seemed very Memphis to me.

In a photo from earlier in his career, crime novelist Ace Atkins stands in front of Memphis' famed Sun Studio. Atkins returns to Memphis for his latest novel, "Don't Let the Devil Ride." (Photo by Jay Nolen)

You live less than an hour from Memphis. So, when you go there, it’s not always for research. You still go just for fun, right?

The fun thing about this book was it didn’t really require a lot of research. Places that are brought alive in the book are places that I’ve been many times, and in some cases, they don’t even exist anymore.

There might have been a time where I needed to go to the Port of Memphis (for research) and see where they were unloading some things. And that’s the great thing about living here is, in 45 minutes, I’m at the Port of Memphis. And I can walk around and get those details of exactly what it looks like.

But no, I’m in Memphis frequently and just for very boring reasons, whether it’s a doctor’s visit or a trip to Costco. But also, just to eat. There are so many great restaurants in Memphis.

I’ll look for any excuse to go to Payne’s Bar-B-Q. I ate there a few weeks ago with a friend of mine who’s a writer, and I was thinking, ‘Is it as good as I remember?’ And it was better than I remember. The sandwich was just phenomenal.

So what are you writing next?

I’m in production now for next year’s book, which is a spy novel. There is one character that has a connection to “Don’t Let the Devil Ride,” but in no way is it a sequel or anything. It’s just a reference, kind of a riff on the story.

It’s my own personal take on a classic spy novel, and for people who’ve read ‘Don’t Let the Devil Ride’ and enjoyed the humor in it, hopefully, it has that same kind of humorous feel to it.

And will we be seeing more of Porter Hayes somewhere down the road?

I think so. That’s what I would like. I’m finishing up this (other) book right now that’ll be out next year, and what I would like to do is go back to that original story that I was working on with Porter Hayes that is set in the 1990s, about the same time that I first arrived in Memphis.

So you’ll get to see him as a younger man, 25 or so years before the events of “Don’t Let the Devil Ride.”

What about Quinn Colson? Are there any plans to resume that series?

That’s the plan. Some of those things are out of your hands, depending on what the editor wants and what’s going on at the moment. But I would love to return to both Porter Hayes and I would love to return to Quinn Colson and kind of circle back to the original plan from 2010.

These are my two favorite characters that I want to write about, and I want to continue writing their stories and, at the same time, write some stand-alones, too.

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