Dougie Bailey took a line from a Shakespeare play and used it to name his novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD. He could just as well used four similar words which were part of the vernacular of all the characters in his turn-of-the-19th-century novel. Those words would be DEVIL FOR US ALL as in the old expression, "Every man for himself and the devil for us all."  This colloquialism was the law of the streets in Bailey's fictional southeast Alabama town of Aven. Bailey's main character, Buck Bannon, rationalizes his treachery by claiming that he's always simply worked in the interest of his "family" but Buck is in reality an island to himself whose competitive spirit could be summed up as "Screw everybody else. Take care of yourself before they take care of you." Aven was a world with little spirit of cooperation and where grievances were often wiped out in blood as proven by Buck's last statement to his younger brother, Hearn,"Words won't help. I'd have killed any other man, maybe any other of my brothers. You'll just be lucky to walk out."