Intruder in the Dust is a 1948 novel by William Faulkner, and part of his Yoknapatawpha County Shared Universe. While not without its rambling tangents, it has one of the more straightforward plots in Faulkner's bibliography and is one of his few mystery novels.
Lucas Beauchamp is a proud and successful black farmer who refuses to play the part of an inferior for the racist white community. When he is accused of murder, it looks increasingly likely that he will never live to stand trial. However, there are members of the white community who believe in his innocence and seek to save his life, sometimes while grappling with the complexity of their own feelings toward Lucas.
Clarence Brown made a film adaptation a year after the novel’s release, following the book’s plot closely.
Tropes in the book and movie:
- Age Lift:
- Mrs. Habersham is seventy in the book and eighty in the film.
- The Gowrie twins are about thirty in the book (their younger brother Vinson is twenty-eight), but are younger than Vinson in the film, where Nub Gowrie says that his wife suffered Death by Childbirth when the twins were born and that this happened twenty-five years ago.
- Androcles' Lion: Years before the story, Lucas saved Chick from drowning and refused Chick’s attempts to make it up to him. Chick's continuing sense of obligation (and mixed feelings about being indebted to a black man whom much of the town dislikes) is what motivates him to keep Lucas from being executed (legally or otherwise) after he is accused of murdering Vinson Gowrie, and his Kid Detective work helps lead to Lucas’s exoneration.
- Cain and Abel: Murder victim Vinson Gowrie was an enterprising man striving to move beyond his backwoods roots (although he still didn’t think much of threatening to beat up a black man who wouldn't give him information he wanted about a theft), and is killed by one of his brothers to cover up that theft.
- Cool Old Lady: The septuagenarian Ms. Habersham is descended from slave owners but is also one of the only people in town to defend black murder suspect Lucas Beauchamp's good name and goes as far as to sit in the jail to protect him from a lynch mob (gambling on how they Wouldn't Hit a Girl) after the jailer flees. She is also the godmother of one of Lucas's children.
- Decoy Protagonist: Chick's uncle Gavin Stevens is a recurring Faulkner protagonist known for his intelligence and ideals who accepts the role of the Wrongfully Accused Lucas’s defense attorney. However, he is ineffectual and sometimes condescending in dealing with Lucas and assumes his client is guilty (although admittedly, the frame-up was clever). Gavin plays almost no role in either clearing Lucas’s name (the sheriff catches the real culprit before the case ever goes to trial) or stopping the lynch mob gathering outside the jail.
- Draft Dodging: When Crawford Gowrie got a draft notice at the start of World War I in the Back Story, he spent eighteen months hiding in caves before being captured after a thirty-hour shootout where, fortunately, no one was killed. The Federal agents who arrested Crawford were quick to point out that the prison sentence for refusing to join the army was six months shorter than the time he spent living like a hermit, and he still had to serve that sentence anyway.
- Kill It with Fire: Crawford and the rest of the lynch mob hope to kill Lucas by setting the jail on fire while he is locked inside.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: Long after Crawford is arrested for the murders, people are left wondering about the circumstances behind him being allowed to keep his gun (with just one bullet in it, which he used on himself) in his cell with him.
- Paying in Coins: Lucas pays his defense attorney's fee (which is admittedly under a dollar, given how the case never went to trial) in pennies and then demands a receipt, at least partially to rub in how Gavin prejudged him and thought he was guilty.
- Quicksand Sucks: The bodies of Vinson Gowrie and a witness to his murder both mysteriously disappear, leading to a search for them to conduct a ballistics test on the bullets. It turns out they were dumped in a patch of quicksand, and Mr. Gowrie leaps into the quicksand and kicks around the bottom with his feet to find the bodies.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Sheriff Hampton is willing to consider evidence that a black murder suspect is innocent despite the time period and sentiments of the community, and eventually sets a trap to catch the real killer.
