The Bible Salesman

June 16, 2008
In this rollicking, rambling road novel of the post-WWII South, Preston Clearwater, a dead ringer for Clark Gable, steals cars and passes himself off as an undercover FBI agent. His mark is naïve 20-year-old Bible salesman Henry Dampier, whom Preston convinces to drive the cars to various paint shops (telling Henry that they have infiltrated a car-theft ring), while Preston follows in his own legally registered Chrysler. Preston undertakes more audacious forms of crime, while earnest Henry has a reunion with his fundamentalist family, listens to his cousin's scheme to market a new ad gimmick (called “the bumper sticker”), falls in love with roadside fruit-stand proprietor Marlene Greene and even manages to sell a few Bibles along the way. The hitch is his involvement with Preston: Henry will have to get wise to preserve all he has gained. Too many flashbacks to Henry's Baptist roots slow him down on the way to the novel's suspenseful climax and moving epilogue, but the result is one of the better takes on Southern Bible salesman buddy stories since Moses Pray and Addie Pray of Paper Moon
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Mix one young and gullible Bible salesman with a career criminal, set them on the back roads of 1930s North Carolina, and you'll hear one enjoyable yarn. Narrator T. Ryder Smith wraps his soft-spoken delivery around the comic antics and sudden violence with an ease and assuredness that transcend the written word. A chance meeting between Bible salesman Henry Dampier and "undercover" G-man Preston Clearwater sets one on the path of enlightenment and the other on the path of justice. Characters remark about the absurdity of a life in poverty with insouciance, and Smith shines brightest when portraying the lovable country folk as they eke out lives of quiet desperation with guidance from their Bibles. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine