Arkansas Review: Delta Themes in the Legal Thriller Fiction of Arkansas Native Webb Hubbell
To the ears of those who followed politics in the late 1990s, the name Webb Hubbell has a familiar ring. Many remember Hubbell as an associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton who forged a friendship with the Clintons in Little Rock when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, and who later rose to the position of the Associate Attorney General of the United States under the Clinton presidential administration. Others may remember the name Webb Hubbell from the subsequent Whitewater Scandal, in which Hubbell was caught up, leading ultimately to his conviction and an eighteen-month incarceration at a federal prison in Maryland. Still others might recall Hubbell as the author of the autobiographical expose of the Clinton circle titled Friends in High Places (1997), a conversational and controversial memoir of Hubbell’s interaction with the Clintons from early days when all three were lawyers in Little Rock during the early ’70s, to their roles in high political stakes while in Washington, DC, during the late ’90s.
Yet the Webb Hubbell of the 2000s is something quite other. Since 2014, Hubbell has emerged on the American literary landscape as an acclaimed novelist in the legal thriller genre. Hubbell is now the author of five bestsellers: When Men Betray (2014), Ginger Snaps (2015), A Game of Inches (2016), Eighteenth Green (2018), and East End (2019), all published by New York City-based Beaufort Books, an independent publisher. Several of Hubbell’s novels are set either wholly or partially in central Arkansas and the capital city of Little Rock, firmly rooting Hubbell’s claim to literary fame in fiction of the Mississippi Delta. All five Hubbell novels have received high marks from celebrities, politicians, and writers, including former US president Bill Clinton, Harry Thomason of Designing Women and Evening Shade fame, writer and actor Peter Coyote, and DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff. More icing on the cake: When Men Betray was rated a finalist in the 2014 Forward Review competition, Ginger Snaps captured the Gold Medal IPPY Award in 2016, and Eighteenth Green scored the same in the 2018 Forward Review Indies Book of the Year prize. The news has gotten around in Hubbell’s hometown of Little Rock, where the Central Arkansas Library System stocks a substantial collection of Hubbell’s fiction. His titles are always off the shelf and in the hands of readers. Hubbell, it might be said, appears to be on a bona fide literary roll.
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