Okay, Daniel Woodrell of West Plains, Miss., has just been elevated by Winter’s Bone and Sundance and the Oscars and the general high opinions of critics everywhere into the stratosphere of Great American Novelists, Gritty Division. The buzz, cicadas on a summer night, is deafening. It should be. Woodrell single-handedly generated a new genre—country noir—with his Ozarks-based crime stories. Sure enough, the usual glowing comparisons to Chandler, Faulkner, Mosley, Jim Thompson and Cormac McCarthy have all been sung. He’s a “backcountry Shakespeare,” opines the La Times. He’s “deeply atmospheric and oozing with the mojo of the swamp,” says the Chicago...