Leavin’ Trunk Blues
July 2000

In the music clubs on the South Side of Chicago, the blues—once as strong as the backs of the neighborhood's working class—has lost its hope and its voice.

Seventy miles away, locked in a scarred prison cell, waits Ruby Walker. More than forty years ago, she boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to what she believed was her Promised Land. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city has ever known, but she lost it all after being convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in September 1959. Decades later, a flickering hope emerges to Walker in the form of letters from a Tulane University blues historian named Nick Travers. She agrees to an interview only in exchange for him checking out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours. After arriving at Union Station, Travers learns there are those who still want the details surrounding Lyons's death to remain hidden in the rubble of the blighted neighborhoods-and that Walker's fate may be the key to finding out who really murdered Lyons.

 
Critical Praise

“If the streets of Chicago’s South Side could talk, they would probably speak in the cracked voices of the bluesmen who shuffle through Ace Atkins’s soulful mystery Leavin’ Trunk Blues.”—The New York Times

“A major player in the mystery genre.”—The Chicago Tribune

“Atkins… evokes the atmosphere of steamy New Orleans and gritty Chicago with vivid, sensual writing.” —The Albuquerque Tribune