Welcome back to Crime Capsule. I'm your host, Benjamin Morris.

This week, we are continuing our conversation with Larry Wood, author of Murder and Mayhem in Southeast Kansas, published by the History Press.

If you missed the first part of our interview, be sure to check it out.

Thanks as always for listening. Let's get back to it. Larry, welcome back to Crime Capsule.

Thanks. God to be back. So last week, we had a delightful tour through the murdery misdeeds

of Miss Minnie Wallace. And this week, I'm afraid we've got to go

somewhere a little darker, don't we?

Little darker, yeah. It's a little darker. There's nothing, nothing romantic about this one.

No, no, nothing at all. Now, I'm going to start off by saying, so it'll take me a quick second to say it, but I'm going to say it anyway. One of my absolute favorite novels in the world, and I know that I'm not alone in this, is the novel called The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is a staggering vision of kind of what life would look like, you know, after a kind of apocalypse

and father and son travel them through a wasteland and a very recognizable southern wasteland,

I should say. And the folks they meet along the way and it's killer be killed, it's pure

survival. It's very, very harrowing, challenging novel, but it is also,

you know, strangely beautiful in all. It's a desolation and made into a great film, you know,

a couple of years ago. It's a really powerful document. And there's a scene in this novel,

which anyone listening to this show, if you have seen the movie or read the book, you know what scene I'm talking about.

It's when the father and the son visit a house in the middle of nowhere, and they find a hatch in the bottom,

in a floorboard, okay, kind of hidden away in the floorboards.

And that hatch leads down to a basement sort of cellar area.

And I'm not going to say what they find there because folks who know

already know and folks who don't know need to see the film for their own, for their own sake.

But I could not help, Larry, as I was reading this chapter in your book, I could not help.

That scene came to mind over and over and over again,

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