Attica Locke, the crime novelist whose own Texas is still waiting for television

Attica Locke

Photo: Jenny Walters / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1974 Houston, Texas, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Awards	Ernest J. Gaines · Harper Lee Prize · Edgar · Anthony · CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger

When Amazon won a bidding contest this week for a drama called Whiskey Matriarch, Attica Locke’s name was on the deal as a writer and executive producer, one more credit on a long television résumé. The book that made her name has yet to reach television. Bluebird, Bluebird, her novel about a Black Texas Ranger working the back roads of East Texas, was voted this summer into the New York Times selection of the best thrillers of the century so far, and a series based on it has sat in development for almost three years without a network. Locke has become one of the busiest adapters in American television while the East Texas she built on the page is still waiting for its own turn on screen.

She has never pretended the two jobs are alike. Writing novels, she has said, is “an entirely solo act”, while television is “deeply collaborative” and, at its best, “like a symphony”. Her fiction carries traces of both: plotting with the discipline of a writers’ room, and the slow material television tends to cut, such as the weight a family’s history with a patch of land can carry against any piece of evidence.

Locke was born in Houston in 1974 to parents active in the civil rights movement, who named her after the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York. Her father, a campaigner who became an attorney, later finished second in the 2009 race for mayor of Houston, and politics conducted behind closed doors became one of her subjects. Her older sister is the actress and memoirist Tembi Locke. She graduated from Northwestern University’s School of Communication in 1995, was a fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab in 1999, and then wrote screenplays for studios including Paramount, Disney and HBO.

Her first novel, Black Water Rising, came out in 2009. Set in Houston in 1981, it follows Jay Porter, a Black personal injury lawyer short of money and clients, who takes his pregnant wife on a night boat ride along Buffalo Bayou, hears gunshots and dives in to pull a white woman out of the water. The book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and nominated for an Edgar Award, and Kirkus Reviews noted that she drove its plot “with the assurance of a practiced screenwriter”. The Cutting Season followed in 2012 under Dennis Lehane’s imprint at HarperCollins. It moved to Louisiana, to a former plantation run as a tourist attraction with costumed reenactments, where the manager, Caren Gray, is drawn into the killing of a migrant worker found buried at the edge of the property. It won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

Pleasantville, in 2015, brought Jay Porter back on election night in 1996, when a teenage campaign volunteer disappears in a Black middle-class neighborhood on Houston’s north side and he ends up defending a candidate’s nephew in his first murder trial. It won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. Two years later Bluebird, Bluebird introduced Darren Mathews, a Ranger deeply ambivalent about growing up Black in Texas, who drives up Highway 59 to the town of Lark, where a Black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman have been killed. The novel took the Edgar Award for Best Novel, the Anthony Award and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and Ann Patchett wrote that Locke “has both mastered the thriller and exceeded it”.

Two more Darren Mathews novels completed the run. Heaven, My Home (2019) sends him to Caddo Lake to search for the missing nine-year-old son of a jailed white supremacist, and made the New York Times list of the year’s best crime novels. Guide Me Home (2024) closes the trilogy with a Black student who has vanished from an all-white sorority whose members insist she is not missing at all, and with Darren’s mother, the person he trusts least, pushing her way into the case.

The same moral clarity that drives the books has also made Locke a public figure in her own genre. In November 2018 the Mystery Writers of America named Linda Fairstein, the former prosecutor who had led the Manhattan sex crimes unit during the Central Park Five case, as a Grand Master. Locke, who also worked as a writer and producer on Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, the series about that case, publicly asked the organization to reconsider. Two days later it withdrew the honor, the first time it had ever done so, and several members and past honorees accused the board of giving in to a social media campaign. The novels have their own critics: reviewers of her debut complained about convoluted similes and a sluggish labor subplot, and Publishers Weekly found Pleasantville rushed. The charge that she writes arguments about race and justice dressed as thrillers has some truth, but the Highway 59 books earn theirs through a hero who keeps choosing a home that keeps failing him.

Television has filled the years between novels. Locke wrote and produced on Fox’s Empire and on Hulu‘s version of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, which brought her an NAACP Image Award for television writing. With Tembi she co-created From Scratch, Netflix‘s adaptation of her sister’s memoir, in 2022. In January 2024 the sisters signed an overall deal with Universal Television, with Bluebird, Bluebird as their first project. In September 2026 Peacock ordered their series version of Kennedy Ryan’s novel Before I Let Go, with the Lockes as showrunners, and this October Amazon picked up Whiskey Matriarch, a Taraji P. Henson vehicle with both sisters writing and producing.

Locke lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter, far from the Texas she writes about. No new novel has been announced since Guide Me Home. For now Darren Mathews exists only in print. Gillian Flynn was among the voters who put his first case on the Times list of the century’s best thrillers, and the trilogy’s argument about a state that keeps its history close is complete on the page, even as its author spends her days bringing other people’s stories to the screen.

Tags: writers, novelists, Attica Locke, Tembi Locke, Whiskey Matriarch, Black Water Rising

Attica Locke, the crime novelist whose own Texas is still waiting for television

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