Oklahoma noir

Lou Berney is warmly funny and engaging, providing the thoughtful responses you’d expect from a seasoned author of seven novels, including Dark Ride, November Road and The Long and Faraway Gone. From his polite comportment, you’d never guess the characters and situations percolating just under the surface. With his latest book, Crooks, hitting shelves on Sept. 9, readers have a chance to peek into the imagination of this celebrated local writer and dive deeply into the world of the Mercurio family.

Local readers will also especially enjoy the setting: Oklahoma City in her various phases: the swinging sixties (or at least as swinging as the sixties got in the buckle of the Bible Belt); the gritty, glitzy seventies; the busted eighties. It’s both easier and more fun to fully immerse yourself in the plot when you can so clearly envision the locations of the Mercurio family’s criminal enterprise, the children’s misdemeanor mischief. Just the mention of a long-forgotten department store can teleport you back to the late seventies and early eighties, to an Oklahoma City bookended by brighter days. You can practically smell the TG&Y as the kids try to abscond with a little merch.

This story is about five siblings: Ray, Jeremy, Alice, Tallulah and Piggy. “One sibling is not really that bad, but also not great. One’s a daredevil thief, one’s the muscle, one is just oblivious — he has just always had everything come to him,” Berney said. “One is grappling with change, but he doesn’t know if he is smart enough; he has always been told he’s not. It’s this idea that in your family, you’re always treated a certain way, and that sinks in deep, for good or for bad.

“I was also thinking about how we’re assigned roles in our families, and these are set so early. Can you escape those roles? Do you even want to escape those roles? I was thinking about my own family, and just that idea of sibling relationships. I knew I wanted to write a crime novel, and I wanted it to be about siblings.”

Berney is known for creating characters who teeter on the edge of redemption. The subgenre is “noir with a conscience,” and it is the perfect place for readers who want to dive into complex characters with a complicated past and an uncertain future. 

It’s noir, so it’s edgy and it’s dark, but for me, there always has to be a glimmer of light somewhere,” Berney explained. “Even if it’s just the possibility of light. Sometimes that door will slam shut, just as it does in life. I always want there to be some element of hope, some lightness.

“I feel like I’m always rooting for my characters, no matter how dark their circumstances. They have always been dealt a certain hand. And sure, they make a few bad decisions, but maybe they weren’t even equipped to make the right decision in the first place.”

The empathy Berney has for his characters is palpable. For the reader, it’s contagious.

These scrappy underdogs navigate tetchy situations while their street smarts and questionable ethics battle their innate sense of right and wrong. Berney’s characters often do all the wrong things for all the right reasons. The tension brought on by this tightrope walk is made even more intense by the deep character development of even the smallest characters. In Crooks, everyone has a past: the nightclub manager, the Karen-y neighbor, the shady L.A. gigolo-roommate, the partner at the Manhattan white-shoe law firm. Everyone is working their way through a reality shaped by their past decisions. Just as Better Call Saul spun off from Breaking Bad, you can imagine any of these characters deserving their own eight-season arc.

The book isn’t just set in Oklahoma; the characters are also imbued with an “Oklahoma-ness” — local archetypes everyone from here will recognize.

“Somebody is a high roller, a hustler, a ne’er-do-well,” Lou explained. “I deeply love Oklahoma, and it is such a joy to bring that into my novels. I just love all the quirky, weird and wonderful stuff that at once is both particular to Oklahoma City and also universal in some way.”

Beyond just writing about the place he knows best, Crooks also teleports readers to many different locations and time periods. Spanning decades, the action takes readers to Hollywood with Jeremy, post-communist Moscow with Tallulah, Las Vegas with Ray. Alice, who believed she had escaped her upbringing, reluctantly takes readers to a commune in Arizona, where she has to lean into her old life to save her current one.

The Lowdown

On Sept. 23, everyone will be able to catch some of Lou’s dialogue on the small screen when Sterlin Harjo’s new television show The Lowdown premieres on FX. Filmed in Oklahoma, the project is packed with talent, including Oklahomans Jeanne Tripplehorn and Tim Blake Nelson. Ethan Hawke stars, and the actor also served as an executive producer.

“It was cool, because Sterlin’s crew — it’s the crew he uses for everything — they just turn on this dance, this power; to see them work is like choreography,” Berney told me about being on set in Tulsa. “It’s so cool to see, there’s such a warmth. I’ve been to other sets; I was a screenwriter for a while, but Sterlin’s sets — I know it’s cliché — just have such a family feel. It was the same in the writers’ room. That feeling of being part of a family… again, I think it’s an Oklahoma thing.”

The writers’ room was also a hotspot for Oklahoma talent, including Tulsa-based crime writer David Tromblay and Duffy Boudreau, who hails from Tulsa and was an executive producer on HBO’s Barry.

“I’d never been a writer in a room, but this was such a great experience,” Berney said. “There were eight of us, several other excellent writers and directors, and Sterlin is just the ideal showrunner to work with. For me, at least, it was perfect.”

There’s also always the chance that one of Berney’s books will find its way into production. November Road was acquired by Lawrence Kasdan in 2018 and was set to begin pre-production when a lengthy delay ultimately led to the project stalling out. But Berney is still hopeful some of his work will find its way to a screen near you.

Readers of Berney’s latest novel will find escapism in the criminal adventures while identifying with complicated family dynamics and sibling relationships, as well as the never-ending struggle to carve out one’s place in the world. With darkly funny dialogue and quick pacing, it’s both unputdownable and something you’re not ready to see come to a conclusion. You get the sense that the characters are still out there, maybe an eccentric running a coffee shop in a weird Oklahoma town or a grandmother blending into the exurbs of OKC. Wherever they are, you hope they’re doing well and texting each other often.

Readers can head to Best of Books, 1313 E. Danforth Road, in Edmond at 6 p.m. Sept. 11 for a discussion of Crooks with Berney, who will also sign copies of his book.

Visit louberney.com.  

This article appears in Fall Guide 2025.