Books by Gerald Duff
Memphis Bluff
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Publisher:TCU Press, May 2020

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Memphis, the Bluff City, is at the heart of Gerald Duff's hilariously violent story about lies, crimes, and those who must dig down to the ugly truths hiding beneath false claims made by movers, shakers, and criminals high and low. Memphis cops J. W. Ragsdale and Tyrone Walker spend their days and ling into their nights peeling back the counterfeit claims of old wealth, gang lords, and the brutal truths of thievery, murder, and deceit. J. W., a one-time cotton farmer, now shops away in the weeds, brambles, and lies of Memphis. His African American partner, Tyrone Walker, steers a straight path whenever he's able. He believes little of what he sees, and he trusts only part of what he senses.  
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Memphis Luck
Memphis Luck

 
Publisher: Brash Books, July 2018
Homicide detectives J.W. Ragsdale and Tyrone Walker are back...investigating what appears to be a simple home invasion robbery gone fatally wrong. The clues lead them to an autistic teenager, an aspiring gang member, who talks to the ghosts of Martin Luthor King Jr. and singer Ricky Nelson for guidance.
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Playing Custer
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Publisher: TCU Press, May 2015

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Playing Custer is a novel narrated from varying points of view and time, illuminating personal and political events leading up to the death of General George Armstrong Custer. The historic events are framed by the story of two men from the late 20th century--one white and one Native American--who travel together to the annual reenactment of the battle at the Little Bighorn National Monument battlefield.
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A Crop of Circles
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Publisher: BlackWyrm Publishing, March 2014
Illegal Aliens: A craft from deep space has been forced to land in an Illinois cornfield, and only a 12-year-old boy named Torbert can see it for what it truly is. The meth cookers next door, the drug dealers in East Saint Louis, and even Torbert's own family have no idea what's been forced to Earth to await a way home. 
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Dirty Rice: A Season in the Evangeline League
Dirty Rice
 
 
Publisher: UL Press, April 2012
In the midst of the Great Depression, minor league baseball thrives in small-town South Louisiana, where the Evangeline League, named in honor of Longfellow’s heroine, draws hundreds to dirt fields and grandstands in places like Jeanerette, Abbeville, and Opelousas. In 1935 Gemar Batiste, a talented young pitcher from Texas, is recruited to try out for the Rayne Rice Birds, makes the roster, and immediately begins garnering fame for himself, his team, and the league.
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Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory
Home Truths
 
Publisher: TCU Press, September 2011
From dealing with intrusive family members to judgmental classmates to marital bliss and misery, Gerald Duff's memoir, Home Truths: A Deep East Texas Memory, describes situations familiar to anyone who has ever lived in a small town. Experiences unfamiliar to the youths of today include growing up during World War II and the descriptions of propaganda tactics, hunting for your own meals, and dealing with the social mores of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Fire Ants and Other Short Stories
Fire Ants
Publisher: NewSouth Books, November 2007
Now Available in Digital Format!
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Gerald Duff’s collection of short stories, Fire Ants, includes work published in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, Missouri Review and other magazines.
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Snake Song
Snake Song
Publisher: Salvo Press, October 2000
The two worlds of Austin Bullock collide with a shock when Chief Emory Sees the Water dies mysteriously in Lost Man Marsh, part of the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in the Big Thicket of East Texas.
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Legends of Lost Man Marsh
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Publisher: Lamar University Literary Press, March 2019
The two worlds of Austin Bullock collide when Chief Emory Sees the Water dies mysteriously in Lost Man Marsh, part of the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation in the Big Thicket of East Texas. By blood, bone, and history, Austin Bullock is now the Chief of his Nation, responsible for maintaining the welfare of his people. He left the reservation years before to teach history, to coach basketball in the white man's school, and to seek an identify apart from his Native American heritage. 
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Nashville Burning
Nashville Burning

Publisher: TCU Press, October 2017

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Nashville Burning is set in three Aprils, those of 1967, '68, and '69, in Music City. In the first, after an event at Vanderbilt University featuring Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Allen Ginsburg, and Strom Thurmond, riots broke out in North Nashville, and that part of town burst into flame—as did self-satisfied notions about civil order and structure in Nashville and the South. The next April, after the assassination of Dr. King in Memphis, Nashville riots took place again, and fire claimed its function.
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Memphis Ribs
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From Brash Books
Brash Books publishes "the best crime novels in existence"!
Original Publisher: Salvo Press, May 1999
Memphis in May. The International BBQ Contest, the Cotton Carnival, and now four bloody murders: a conventioneer is stabbed at an ATM machine, a gang leader and his girlfriend are executed, and a wealthy local businessman is killed in his own home while his bodyguard is napping. It's all on the shoulders of failed cotton farmer & current Memphis homicide detective, J. W. Ragsdale.
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Memphis Mojo
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Publisher: Lamar University Literary Press, February 2014
In Memphis Mojo, J.W. Ragsdale, a failed cotton farmer turned Memphis homicide detective, is faced with a cowboy preacher, a home invasion, urban gangs, and a killer who sees spirits and converses with the dead, including Martin Luther King, Jr and Rickey Nelson. The setting is Memphis, in the year celebrating the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's recording of his first song at Sun Studio, That's All Right, an event publicized in the Bluff City as "A Global Moment in Time."
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Decoration Day and Other Short Stories
Decoration Day
 
 
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, April 2012
Decoration Day and Other Stories ranges in locale from the piney woods of Deep East Texas, to the mean streets of Memphis, to the suburbs of Washington, DC. Highly comic and deeply serious, the collection reaches from the late 19th century to the present day. The title story centers on elderly sisters striving to save an unjustly accused man from a lynch mob, while at the same time fetch home a wagonload of flowering bushes to commemorate their dead in the family cemetery. 
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Blue Sabine
Blue Sabine
 
 
Publisher: Moon City Press, Fall 2011
Blue Sabine is a story of five generations of Holt women, told in their voices, along with some men of Holt blood. It is set along the Sabine River, which divides the state of Texas from Louisiana and the Deep South. From 1867--when the Holts first came to Texas--to the present, the novel chronicles the emotional lives of grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and nieces, all bound by kinship and history.
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Coasters

Coasters

Publisher: NewSouth Books, May 2001
Now Available in Digital Format!
Waylon McPhee, middle-aged and divorced, moves back in with his widowed father in hopes of coasting through another year.
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Graveyard Working
Graveyard Working
Publisher: Baskerville Publishers, Inc., August 1995
It is time for the annual graveyard working at Big Caney, Texas, and all the community it there--a fundamentalist preacher who's formed Christian Guard Dogs, Inc to preserve the true believers from the terrors of the contemporary world, two elderly sisters who have spent decades fighting each other over the hateful and necessary contours of their shared life,  a brother and sister conniving to have their mother committed to an institution for seeing space travelers in the backyard, a Native-American gospel quartet, and others of like mind joined again to pay homage to the dearly departed.
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