Randall Luce's prose style is as slick as a melting block of ice in the Mississippi sun, as insistent as the insectlike hum of a portable fan.
His yet-unpublished novel, Motherless Children, vividly evokes the Deep South in the years after World War II.
It was an era when shopkeepers whiled away slow, weekday afternoons swapping stories and sipping "Co'Colas," cooled by ice chipped shard by shard from a chunk the size of a toaster. It was an era when it was considered unladylike for a woman to open a car door, when men still carried pocket handkerchiefs.
You can practically feel the humidity rise.
The skill with which Luce depicts the Mississippi Delta, circa 1946, has earned him a coveted spot as one of 10 finalists in an American Idol-style publishing contest sponsored by Amazon.com.
The work of the 54-year-old resident of Montgomery Village was selected from among 5,000 submissions to compete for a publishing contract with the Penguin Group and a $25,000 advance.
Visitors to the Web site (amazon.com/abna) can download the top 10 manuscripts and vote for their favorite through Monday. To vote, visitors must read at least one excerpt, write a review and assign it between zero and five stars. The manuscript with the most points will win the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest. Results will be announced April 7.
Luce, who lived in Westminster for 19 years, works as a paralegal for a Washington law firm. He spent five years crafting Motherless Children, his debut novel, on nights and weekends, revising it six times before working up the nerve to show it to an editor.
"This contest has moved me much closer to my goals than I ever have been before," says Luce, who, before the competition, had trouble finding an agent willing to peruse a manuscript by an unproven author.
"Because of the contest, my unpublished novel got a positive review from Publishers Weekly," Luce says. "Because of the contest, an agent is now reading through it. If people download the excerpt online and enjoy it, that's what it's all about."
Not that Luce hasn't had supporters who believe in his talent. Among them is Sarah Flynn, a freelance editor who previously worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors during her eight years at Houghton Mifflin.
"It's rare that I read a work of fiction that I think doesn't need much revising," she says. "But that was my reaction when I first saw the manuscript of Motherless Children. It's way more than a murder mystery. I'm the co-author of a book about the civil rights movement, and when I read Randy's novel, I was struck by its moral complexity."
In a sense, Luce has been writing Motherless Children for at least two decades, since conducting fieldwork in the delta for his doctorate in anthropology.
The novel is a whodunit set in a small cotton town. Sam Swain, the chief of police, investigates the fatal poisonings of two members of the wealthy Southworth family: the eccentric spinster Adelia "Auntie" Southworth and her headstrong niece, Madeleine.
Running beneath the plot, like a trickle of sweat on a scorching summer's day, are themes of race, power and justice.
"I did research in the Mississippi Delta for 18 months in the 1980s on the changing perceptions of leadership in the African-American and white communities," Luce says.
"A lot of incidents in the book were inspired by stories I heard. For instance, the character of Auntie is based very loosely on an elderly woman from a prominent family. She blithely went through her life above all the rules.'"
Motherless Children also traces the first stirrings of what would become the civil rights movement.
"A lot of people don't know that the civil rights movement didn't start in the late 1950s or early 1960s," Luce says. "It started in the 1940s in small ways. I wanted to pay testament to that time."
Publishers Weekly, which reviewed all 10 finalists, lavished superlatives on Motherless Children, describing the novel as "a rich, complicated mystery that succeeds at nearly every level."
Luce is one of those people who has so many abilities and interests, it's hard for him to concentrate on just one. He wrote stories as a kid growing up in California but put fiction aside when he enrolled in college and became fascinated by anthropology. He earned a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1983.
But the newly minted graduate was uninterested in pursuing a typical academic career. "I wanted to help people," he says. "I wanted to make a difference."
For more than a decade, Luce took low-paying jobs in relief organizations, doing things like advocating for the homeless and visiting clinics in Ethiopia during the famine.
He left the nonprofit world and began teaching anthropology part time at several local colleges, including Towson University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Later, in a search of a living wage, he took a job as a paralegal at a Washington law firm.
About that time, he came up with the idea for a mystery. He jotted down notes during his four-hour daily commute from his former home in Westminster.
"I always thought that if I wrote a novel, all the characters would sound like me, and I didn't think that would be very interesting," he says.
"But one day, I thought, 'Why don't I try it?' After a while, I started getting a sense of what my characters were like, that they would use this word, but not that word.
"I was really surprised to discover that I was writing a novel, and even more surprised when I realized I'd finish it. When I look back at that time, I have a stack of paper to prove that I wrote a novel. But I have absolutely no idea how I did it."
Luce is pleased that he has advanced in the competition this far, though early results showed Motherless Children lagging behind the front-runners.
His fans are keeping their fingers crossed that Luce's novel will generate an 11th-hour groundswell of support. Otherwise, Motherless Children might never get published. How, then, will we find out who prepared Auntie and Maddie that potent brew of cyanide tea?
mary.mccauley@baltsun.com