Faulkner’s novel is many things at once: a murder mystery, a story of racial injustice on the eve of the civil rights movement, and something like picaresque become deadly serious. Faulkner is slippery. None of those things are as straightforward as they first appear. The story begins with Lucas Beauchamp, a black man, imprisoned in the county jail, accused of the murder of a white man named Vinson Gowrie. The story doesn’t begin there exactly, because the narrator explains why the main character, a sixteen-year-old boy named Charles “Chick” Mallison, has the bona fides to tell Lucas’ story: “Because he Read more