Attica Locke: ‘As many tears as I have right now, I have this little pebble of hope’

As a screenwriter, Attica Locke’s credits include the television shows Empire and Little Fires Everywhere. Since 2009 she has matched that success with an award-winning second career as a crime novelist. Her sixth book, Guide Me Home, is the finale to her Highway 59 trilogy, which centres on a black Texas Ranger named Darren Mathews, and. infuses atmospheric mystery with searing insights into racial tensions and social responsibility.Born and raised in Houston, Locke lives in Los Angeles and is on the judging panel for this year’s National Book Awards. She will also appear at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing festival in Harrogate on 18 July.

What made you call time on Highway 59 three novels in?

I thought I might write eight or 10 of these books, but the pandemic disrupted so many things in my life, and then with George Floyd my feelings about cops changed. The series also became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that I had not intended. I had this fantasy that if I closed out the series, maybe I’d close out this chapter of American history. That did not happen.

Tell me about the inspiration behind the protagonist, Darren Mathews.

The family background that I gave him is my family background: black Texans going back to [the time of] slavery, who stayed because we had land. We were the reverse of the Great Migration. Our thinking about the world is very similar.

Has he ever surprised you?

Before I even started writing it, I realised he’d done something unethical. It was an early surprise but it became the crux of who he is, and the crux of the entire series, haunting him for all three books. I don’t plot meticulously, and the beauty of that is it allows for surprises.

East Texas is a potent character. Did it help to be living somewhere else?

Being away probably made the books better. They came from a sensation in my body of longing.I was actually working on Empire at the time and the word “home” kept coming to me. I knew almost instantly that I meant Texas. So part of their essence is this pulse of love, even if it’s the complicated love of a place that disappoints you and doesn’t always love you back.

You’re currently adapting Highway 59 for television with your sister, the actress Tembi Locke, as co-writer and co-producer. What’s it like working together?

We work well together. I can get very political; she adds heart and comes at a character in a different way. As kids, we bickered like crazy but even before this creative partnership, we took our sisterhood seriously. We both have had a lot of therapy, so we make sure that we’re protecting one of life’s more significant relationships. We treat it as you might treat a marriage.

What made you a storyteller?

There are poets in my ancestral line whose work was never published, and I do like to run my mouth. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been a very dreamy person; I always know that I can escape into my own brain. As much as storytelling is about communion with others, it’s also about really enjoying the pleasure of your own company. I’ve always been entertained by myself.

If you were forced to choose between screenwriting and writing novels ...

They are two different ways of being alive. At the age I am now, and with the chaos of the world that we’re living in, there’s a way in which I prefer the quiet of writing books. But I need the two disciplines because one makes me money and the other doesn’t! Also, there is a chance that if during this entire time I had only been writing books, I would have gone out of a window. I like the camaraderie of Hollywood.

How is your state of mind six months into Donald Trump’s second term?

My fundamental setting is optimism. As many tears as I have right now, strangely – and people look at me like, “Poor little Attica!” – I have this pebble of hope. But these are very difficult days, and I’m in Los Angeles where there are ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids right now. I’m afraid a lot. I’m even afraid of not being let back into the country after this trip. I’m getting ready to take to the UK.

Has the political situation in the US altered your thinking about what literature can achieve?

I know that for readers, books are a salve, and have the potential to grow hearts and minds – otherwise people wouldn’t try to ban them. But I also don’t know how many people are deeply reading right now. There’s that gap between deciding to read a book and then settling into it, where things get really quiet and a lot can flood your brain. Are we on the verge of war? Are my neighbours being rounded up right now? What did Trump say yesterday? It is so much easier to pick up a phone and get lost in scrolling.

How worried are you about AI?

I’m terrified of AI and about people losing their jobs, and I am angry as a writer that they are using our material to train. Also i It is very,also very uncomfortable to live in a time when you cannot trust any image that you see other than a tree or a flower. Maybe we always should have been looking at something and then trying to double, triple, quadruple check, but it is really destabilising.

Where do you turn for solace?

Music is a mood stabiliser for me. I’m a new empty-nester and my husband and I made this pact to go to a couple of concerts every quarter. I saw Rhiannon Giddens and Leon Bridges, and I’ve discovered the Teskey Brothers, two white Australians who make incredible blues. I’m also turning very woo-woo. I’ve got some crystals on my desk right now; I’ve got these Tibetan cymbals … I’m trying every way to feel a sense of peace.

What do you need in order to write?

It’s very hard for me to write without a window. It doesn’t even have to be a great view: when my daughter was young, that window was the windshield of my car. I just don’t want to be in a box.

Who are your favourite crime novelists, and which novels?

I love Walter Mosley. I don’t know that you would consider Pete Dexter a crime novelist but why not? And I worship the ground that Megan Abbott walks on. I think almost every novel is a crime novel. We’re really talking about transgressions, so I think that Beloved by Toni Morrison is a crime novel because it’s about one of the biggest crimes in American history: slavery.

Photograph by Victoria Will