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Former New Orleans Saint NICK TRAVERS blew his pro football career when he punched out his coach out on national television. So now he's a professor of the blues at Louisiana's Tulane University and sometime-harmonica player who makes like a private eye in his debut, the well-received Crossroad Blues (1998) when he looks into the disappearancce of a colleague. Seems his pal was hot on the trail of some long-lost recordings by Robert Johnson in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood, when he disappeared. Along the way, Nick comes across the usual murderous mess of greed, corruption and secrets. Oh, yes, and a psychopath who thinks he's Elvis. An auspicious debut, making great use of setting, and Nick Travers is an intriguingly flawed hero, worth getting to know. Or at least that was my initial impression. Unfortunately, as a series, the amateur sleuth conventions started to wear thin pretty quickly, and all the goofy killers and obligatory blues name-dropping didn't seem quite as fresh anymore. But far more annoying to me are the recurring potshots at white boys playing the blues; the charge being that they couldn't possibly understand them. These may seem a mite hypocritcal, given that the author is himself a white boy and considering that the books themselves often seem not so much bluesy as merely about the blues -- more about the trivia than the feel; a gimmick that never quite comes alive. And that's too bad, because at his best, Atkins is a decent writer, with a knack for atmosphere. I'm still at the crossroads about this series. In 2009, still rooting around in the past -- or possibly looking for a fresher idea -- Atkins took a shot at casting Dashiell Hammett himself as a private eye in the historical novel Devil's Garden. UNDER OATH
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