Lawmen, Outlaws, and the Murky Middle

In Southern noir, the badge doesn’t always mean clean hands—and the outlaw isn’t always the worst guy in the room.

I’ve never been interested in perfect heroes or one-dimensional villains, especially when it comes to the folks who carry guns and enforce the law. In my stories, sheriffs, deputies, and investigators aren’t just uniforms—they’re people. Complicated ones. Some are loyal to the truth. Some are loyal to their kin. And some? They’re just trying to make it to retirement without getting shot or selling what’s left of their soul.

The South I write doesn’t offer easy choices. Lawmen might turn a blind eye to a moonshiner because they grew up together—or because that same man buried two bodies the law can’t afford to dig up. A deputy might plant evidence not because he’s corrupt, but because he thinks it’s the only way to get justice for someone nobody else cares about. Or maybe he is corrupt, but he still calls your mama “ma’am” and leaves flowers on your aunt’s grave.

It’s messy. That’s the point.

Sometimes, the lawman is the outlaw. Other times, the outlaw’s the one trying to keep things from spinning further out of control. The tension lives in that ambiguity, that blurred space between what’s right and what’s necessary.

And if a reader finds themselves unsure who to root for, good. That means I did it right.

I don’t write about clean shootouts and tidy arrests. I write about favors called in at midnight. About boot prints by the river no one reports. About a sheriff who knows the truth but keeps it in his back pocket because revealing it would burn the whole damn town down.

Southern noir lawmen live in the gray—not because they don’t know right from wrong, but because they know too damn well how little difference it sometimes makes.