Why Attica Locke says ‘Guide Me Home’ will conclude her Highway 59 novels

Home is a lot of things for Attica Locke. 

Home, for the author of the new novel “Guide Me Home” — the final installment in a critically acclaimed trilogy of crime novels — is Los Angeles, where she lives, and where she wrote and produced for series including “Empire” and “Little Fires Everywhere.”

Home is also East Texas, where she was born and raised, and where her Highway 59 series of novels takes place. The trilogy, which started in 2017 with the award-winning “Bluebird, Bluebird,” and continued two years after that with “Heaven, My Home,” follows Darren Mathews, a Black Texas Ranger with a complicated life. “Guide Me Home” finds Mathews investigating the disappearance of a college student while navigating America under President Donald Trump.

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“The whole thing is about home for me because it’s about my East Texas roots,” Locke says of her latest novel. “It’s a literal home in that I was born and raised in Houston, but I also mean home in the sense of home, my best self; home, where my integrity lies; home, where my fortitude lies; home, where my courage lies.”

There’s a reason, Locke says, that the word “home” appears in two of the novels’ titles.

“Home for me represents all of these things,” she explains. “It is a literal place in the world, and it’s a figurative container for my value system, the East Texas values I was raised with. But it’s also a place inside of me where I know who I am and I know my voice and I know what I’m trying to say.”

Locke answered questions about “Guide Me Home” via telephone from Los Angeles. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Q: How did it feel to write again about Darren Mathews?

Like going home, so to speak. The thing about this series is that it kind of inadvertently became a comment on the Trump era in a way that I had not intended as an artist. When I wrote “Bluebird, Bluebird,” he was running for office, but I didn’t think he would become president, and I don’t think any of us could have predicted a lot of the things that happened on the other side of his election: insurrections and the pandemic and George Floyd and all these things. What this book series gave me is a space to kind of process my feelings about what’s been going on in our country. In that sense, there was a way to return to a space where I could process where we are, at what I hope is the end of the Trump era. So in that sense, it was good. 

I had all the nerves, I will say, because I had not intended this book series to be a trilogy. I made that decision at some point during the pandemic lockdown. I thought it was going to be a book series that would go on for a while, at least five books. But during lockdown, the third book in the series, I actually wanted to go to Laredo. Laredo is a town on the U.S.-Mexican border that’s also off Highway 59. And I’m sitting during lockdown where none of us knows if we’re ever leaving our house again. I thought, “Well, I can’t research that. I have no way of going to Laredo to even get a sense of the place, so that feels like something I can’t do.” I started to think that I could be writing Darren Mathews until I’m 70 because the space between the books felt like it was growing. So I just got this sense that I wanted to close it out where it began in rural East Texas. And that’s when I knew I wanted this last book to be the final book, and that it would be a trilogy.

Q: East Texas really is a whole other world.

I would say that was part of the fun of the book. What I mean by that is it is something to have your culture represented in literature. I think everybody at some point has felt this before. I think there are young people who discover queer YA and then feel seen, and feel like, “My way of looking at the world, the way that I live in my body, the way that I love, is being represented in literature.” And I think this is a part of Texas from a Black perspective that I don’t feel like had really been written down, or at least I wanted to add my little piece to it. So there was actually great pleasure luxuriating and inviting people into this very particular subculture in Texas. I felt like I was writing a love letter to Black Texas.

Q: You grew up in Houston. Did you frequently go up and down Highway 59 when you were a kid?

Absolutely. I have said before that I became a writer on Highway 59 because I was always a daydreaming kind of kid. All of my people on my mom’s side, my dad’s side, going back to slavery, they all come from little towns off of this one highway in East Texas. So I spent a good part of my childhood going up and down to all these little towns visiting people, and there were no cell phones back then. I’m just sitting in the back seat looking at the kind of craggy woods and the pine trees and the bayou and the creeks and people selling stuff out of their trailer. It’s just a kind of rural fantasia, as I’ve called it.

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Q: When you were writing “Bluebird,” did you end up doing a lot of research into the Texas Rangers?

I did, because I didn’t really know what they did. [Laughs.] I lived in Texas for the first 18 years of my life and have visited numerous times. I’ve seen Texas Rangers in the wild one time because there’s just not that many of them. When you see them in the wild, it’s like you kind of gasp because it’s just the iconography of the hat and the badge and the whole thing. I was very, very lucky in that there was a gentleman who worked for the Rangers, Kip Westmoreland, who was willing to do an interview with me. And then I read a lot of books about Rangers and a lot of contemporary reporting about Rangers. The Dallas Morning News has done a lot of great reporting, the Houston Chronicle, Texas Monthly. And that’s when I learned that they’re like an FBI for Texas. And when I learned about the work that they had been doing to take down the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, that felt like just a ripe playground to find a story.

The author will appear with her sister, actor and author Tembi Locke, at Vroman’s on Sept. 17.