Excerpt:
...'Of course I know who Jimmy Lee Sudduth is' said the bank teller in Fayette, Alabama. 'He's our most famous resident. But he's been ill. I know you've come a long way but truthfully...I couldn't say whether he's still with us.'

I'd already tried a phone number pinned to the door of Sudduth's derelict house and got no response. 'Well that's that I suppose' I said to my girlfriend. I'd met Jimmy Lee some five years earlier when he had been an inexhaustible fountain of entertainment. But even then he was well into his eighties.