When the criminal world is at your fingertips and your daughter has gone missing, would you be willing to risk everything to save her? Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne introduces listeners to a refreshingly convoluted character struggling with a choice that could put her and her entire crime operation at risk. With a mysterious hit man out to collect his bounty, Babs prepares herself for the most important battle of her life—all in the name of family.
Nicole Ransome: Protagonist Babs Dionne is a grandmother who is also a godfather of crime who controls a large drug organization. What drew you to create a story surrounding the life of a crime matriarch?
Ron Currie: A whole bunch of things, more than I can summarize here, but broadly speaking, I've always been fascinated by people who have their own code, who do bad things for good reasons (or vice versa), who trust their convictions so completely that they will not violate them no matter the cost. Babs is that kind of person through and through.
She saw clearly, even as a child, that her people—French-Canadian immigrants who came to America to work in paper and textile mills—were never going to be given a fair shake in an Anglophone Protestant culture. So rather than play a rigged game, she found a way to control her little corner of the world, and run it to her and her neighbors' benefit. But when we meet her at the beginning of the novel, for the first time she's starting to lose that control.
Babs is up against a mysterious hit man called The Man, who's been sent after Babs and her business by a competing drug lord. What was the intention behind naming the hit man who's looking to topple Babs's drug ring “The Man”?
The Man is almost mythic, elemental—as he makes his way through Waterville's underworld, he tells people repeatedly, when asked who he is, that who he is doesn't matter. As far as The Man is concerned, he's not so much a person as a force. He doesn't have an identity and isn't particularly interested in acquiring one; as such, it didn't make sense to give him a proper name. He compares himself to the golem of Jewish folklore (the inspiration, of course, for Frankenstein's Monster): neither alive nor dead and, once set in motion, impossible to control.
The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne dives deep into Babs’s background and her familial connections and history. It really allows for the listeners to understand the character more and more. How did you go about creating such a humanized character despite her lifestyle?
Everyone's got a story, right? And Babs, tough and ferocious as she can be, is also deeply, almost tragically human. As her best friend Rita says of her in the book, "If you loved like Babs does, it would break you."
"Understanding why we are who we are, as people, is one of the great gifts that good stories can provide. Good stories explain us to ourselves."
But for me at least, it's not enough to know that a character holds both great love and great violence within her; I want to know how she became such a study in contradictions. Understanding why we are who we are, as people, is one of the great gifts that good stories can provide. Good stories explain us to ourselves.
This story features interesting characters that are either family, friend, or foe to Babs Dionne. Which character’s relationship to Babs did you enjoy crafting the most?
Oh, that's a tough one. It's sort of impossible for me to choose, because her relationships are so wildly different. She and The Man are perfect foils for one another; he relies on an almost supernatural ability to intimidate to get what he wants, but Babs cannot be intimidated.
I love the friendship Babs has with Father Clement, which was forged from shared tragedy when she was still a girl; their mutual love and respect comes out in the way they're constantly jousting and making fun, but all the while it's clear either one would lay down in traffic for the other.
Babs's relationship with her older daughter, Lori, is as contentious as it is loving; when they look at each other it's like gazing into a mirror, and that always makes for a complicated dynamic. And then there's the version of Babs that comes out when she's in the presence of her grandson Jason: unerringly gentle and protective and selfless, the polar opposite of what she is to her enemies.
What was your inspiration for the title of your book?
I've been engaged in conversation with someone recently about the tension—and power—that results from holding two opposites within us at once. In contemporary usage, the words "savage" and "noble" aren't precise antonyms, but at the same time they're pretty opposite, and aren't often seen together; what's thought of as "savage" is not often "noble," and vice versa. But Babs is both those things, in life and in death, and I wanted the title to announce that contradiction.
