Word: towns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Wilson's childhood was spent in "a small coal-mining town" in Pennsylvania, where his father worked as a miner to support a family of six children until his death...
There's no doubt that the film played toward every nerd stereotype and town-gown conflict it possibly could. The MIT math professor who discovers Hunting's genius is your basic arrogant academic who can't believe that the boy who sweeps his classroom can also solve equations. Hunting's girlfriend, a Harvard senior headed for med school, is rich, privileged, and housed in an ivy-covered dorm which could be any of Harvard's undergraduate houses...
...setting for An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence, the third and best of Jamie Harrison's laconic Montana mystery novels, is the small town of Blue Deer, just miles from Yellowstone National Park but far, far away from anything resembling mainstream, middle-class America. Though it's not a high-crime zone by any measure, Blue Deer is a vortex of dysfunction, its geographic isolation breeding a sense of year-round cabin fever. Fretful, jumpy and deeply divided between new-money urban refugees playing cowboy and no-money long-time residents living off resentment and odd jobs, Blue Deer is also...
Sheriff Jules Clement is the man in charge of keeping the town's cooped-up energies contained. A local boy who's seen the city lights during a stint in New York as a social worker, he'd rather be standing in a mountain trout stream than making his daily rounds, which are mostly devoted to tire slashings, acts of birdbath vandalism and hunting accidents. As an example of what Harrison calls "that final anomaly, a liberal officer of the law," Clement would just as soon not crack most cases, aware that the bulk of them boil down to ignorance...
Harrison (daughter of novelist Jim Harrison) is something of an anomaly herself: a mystery writer who's not only literate and handy with a plot but possessed of a voice and a vision as well. Her off-the-cuff eloquence and easy sarcasm remind one of a small-town courthouse wit, loitering on the steps with a cigarette, flipping digs at starchy passersby. Her supporting characters and assorted suspects, from a snippety lady historian to a blowsy, big-boned social worker, aren't merely fictional head shots. They have body. Stuck way out on the windy plains together, their passions...