The Omnivorous Reader

Little Press Success

Big things can come in small packages

By Stephen E. Smith

Since its founding by professor Ronald Bayes in 1969, St. Andrews Press at St. Andrews University in Laurinburg has earned a reputation as one of the most consistent and persistent small presses in the country — which is no insignificant accomplishment considering that the average small press has a lifespan of five years. Within the last few months, under the editorship of Ted Wojtasik, the press has released two books that deserve a wide audience. The first is Ruth Moose’s The Goings on at Glen Arbor Acres, a collection of interrelated stories about life in an assisted living facility.

Moose has long been a creative force in the North Carolina writing community. She has published two novels as well as numerous collections of short stories and poetry. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal and Our State magazine, and she taught for 15 years on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Moose’s latest collection will not disappoint readers who are seeking to escape the everyday stress of politics and pandemic surges, neither of which is mentioned in these stories. There may be “goings on” aplenty at Glen Arbor Acres, but only of a benign nature. In “The Major’s Gun,” a character observes: “You have to be so careful around this place. One misheard word and the gossip goes rampant” — which is pretty much the source of the collection’s recurring conflicts.

Moreover, readers won’t be troubled by stories about characters who undergo overwhelming misfortunes that culminate in disasters of epic proportions. Glen Arbor is no Keseyesque Cuckoo’s Nest. There’s no Nurse Ratched in the medication room, no physical or verbal combat, no racial utterances to be heard, or even a mildly offensive exclamation that might raise a wary eyebrow. Moose’s slice-of-life stories simply offer readers a window into the everyday dilemmas of Glen Arbor’s elderly residents who eat, drink and sleep in the gossipy microcosm where fate has deposited them. If they are allowed enough freedom to cause a mild degree of mischief, they’re always on the lookout for a new source of intrigue. They’ve identified an antagonist, Miss Anne Blackmore Rae (Miss ABR aka Always Be Right), the director of  Glen Arbor, and a male protagonist, the Major, a resident who functions as an authority figure who might right trifling wrongs, a tired old god the ladies can turn to in times of emotional discomfort.

Moose focuses on her characters’ foibles and eccentricities — there is a nudist yoga teacher, a wig maker, a troll-like man who intrudes himself into the ladies’ daily walks, and the mystery of the director’s runaway dog who may or may not be dead. The most “teachable” story involves a resident who submits a poem to a national poetry contest and is notified by mail that she is a finalist who should attend a dinner meeting to receive her award. Of course, it’s a scam perpetrated on the unsuspecting — in this case, the elderly — but the aspiring poet buys a new dress and attends the ceremony. She doesn’t win (there’s a surprise), but she’s received by her peers at Glen Arbor as a literary luminary, proof that there is success to be had in the waning years, and that good friends value us for who we are, not for what we do.

There’s a good deal of irony and wit in Moose’s stories, even if her characters don’t see themselves as the object of humor, even when the situation and context are obviously comic, and readers will find themselves amused and charmed by her subtly crafted narratives.

Another recent St. Andrews Press publication, Collected Poems of Marty Silverthorne, is justification enough for supporting small presses. Silverthorne died in 2019, and it’s unlikely, regardless of his talents as a poet, that a mainstream or university press would publish a book by an author who isn’t around to promote it at readings and in bookstores.

As a poet, Silverthorne had talent and perseverance to spare. He devoted himself to writing verse while working for 30 years as a counselor for persons suffering from alcohol and drug addiction. Left a quadriplegic after a motorcycle accident in 1976, he faithfully dictated his poems to a caregiver and companion, and until the pandemic, he was a steadfast participant at regular meetings of the North Carolina Poetry Society.

Silverthorne is a “plain language” poet. His poems are straightforward retellings of the events that shaped his life, the loss and redemption, the small pleasures he experiences, the troubles and pain a person in his predicament suffers, as in “Inside of Me,” where the poet muses on what others expect of him after accepting his disability: Inside of me you expected to find/a motorcycle wrapped around a tree,/whiskey bottles beside the road./You did not expect to find daffodils/blooming in a pine thicket,/crape myrtles close enough/to threaten their beauty//Inside of me you expected to find/the soiled pages of Penthouse./You did not expect Yeats and Keats/on a linen table cloth,/one large candle with a wavering flame,/a bottle of chardonnay.

Much of Silverthorne’s later poetry was written while mourning the loss of his wife, as in “Delicate Ashes:” . . . Back at home our neighbor held you in his hands,/his fingers around the beautiful blue bowl/of your body, the delicate ashes of your life . . .

Silverthorne makes rich and various uses of rhetorical devices — humor, anger, wit, irony, and juxtapositions of conflicting and indecorous feelings. In doing so, he has left readers with a rich record of a life lived to the fullest despite almost overwhelming adversity.

We are fortunate that St. Andrews Press and other small presses continue to publish books that might otherwise, for reasons unrelated to literary quality, go unread. The pandemic has hit little presses hard. Readings at bookstores and arts organizations have dropped off, and live audiences are difficult to gather in dangerous times. If you’d like to encourage small press publishing, buy their books. Poets and Writers magazine lists over 370 such literary entities that desperately need our support.  OH

Stephen E. Smith is a retired professor and the author of seven books of poetry and prose. He’s the recipient of the Poetry Northwest Young Poet’s Prize, the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Prize for poetry and four North Carolina Press Awards.

Omnivorous Reader

Hanging Judge

A Carolina courtroom whodunit

By Anne Blythe

If you spend much time in courthouses in North Carolina, you begin to see the complex fabric of their communities.

It might be one thread, one story, one case at a time but, eventually, the many threads are stitched together into a complex tapestry. Katherine Burnette, a district court judge from Oxford who rose to the bench as a former federal and state prosecutor, pulls back the curtain on small-town North Carolina and its dramas in her debut novel, Judge’s Waltz.

It may be fiction, but the storyline created by the attorney-turned-writer — while seemingly over the top at the start — is rooted in insider knowledge from someone who has been in and out of North Carolina courthouses for much of her career.

“Barely audible above the hum of the ancient air conditioner came the creak, creak, creak of the thick rope affixed to the brass chandelier,” writes Burnette in the opening of her mystery. “Swaying ten feet above the intricately carved, pre-Civil War bench, the Honorable Patrick Ryan O’Shea had adjourned to a higher court.”

We quickly find out that O’Shea was not universally revered, nor was he a jurist with great legal acumen. His knack was kissing up to a certain professor in his third year of law school and following suit with a wide swath of politicians who helped him get coveted judicial seats.

“Not noted for his weighty opinions from the bench, O’Shea had come to be noted for the weighty politicians who stood behind him and his bid for a higher court,” Burnette writes. “Apparently, these politicians had garnered their strength and their favors to foist O’Shea upon the unsuspecting Fourth Circuit court.”

O’Shea never got there. His last dance, so to speak, was hanging in a federal courtroom in the Eastern District of North Carolina in nothing more than his black robe. “The only thing that O’Shea could do — was doing — was a slow discordant waltz at the end of a long rope,” Burnette says in her prologue.

The pages of the novel are sprinkled with humor and wit as we meet Buck Davis, the folksy lawyer from Oxford who is tapped by the chief judge in the Eastern District to sort through O’Shea’s cases as Katie O’Connor, an FBI agent Davis remembers fondly from high school, leads the investigation into the judge’s death.

Burnette deftly describes the country roads between Granville County and Raleigh, where the judge’s chambers were. She takes readers into drugstores, restaurants, courthouses and other places that will seem familiar to anyone who has experienced the slower hum of Granville County or the bustling halls of power in the capital city.

You can almost smell the drugstore coffee brewing and taste the Southern food being dished up as the suspense builds over how and why Judge O’Shea found himself suspended from that ceiling. “Today’s courtroom deals were made in the few minutes it took to eat a sausage biscuit,” Burnette writes.

The cast of characters includes Jeb, Buck’s brother, who battles demons from opioid addiction; Walter A. Johnson, the Granville County detective who went to high school with Jeb; and Mary Frances Margaret O’Shea, the widow of the lifeless judge, who does not seem to grieve her loss at all.

Even the relatively minor characters who come and go throughout the mystery are memorable, like the waitress, Wanda, who saunters up to Buck and Katie in the Oak Room with a pencil behind her ear and her weight balanced “on one polyester-clad hip.” The Oxford restaurant is where Buck and Katie often end up as they develop not only their case but also a budding romance.

Wanda gives the couple a dose of reality about the menu choices. There is no wine list, Wanda informs Katie. The choice is strictly by color, red or white. And don’t ask for an exotic imported beer, either. Buck settles for a Miller High Life.

Burnette writes, “Wanda scribbled something on her pad and strolled away. ‘One red, one champagne,’ she hollered to the bartender, confusing Katie.

“‘I didn’t know they served champagne,’ Katie told Buck. ‘No,’ Buck explains. ‘She means the Miller. You know champagne of beers.’”

The mystery of what happened to Judge O’Shea twists and turns as Burnette teases her readers with different scenarios.

Was it suicide?

Was it murder?

At whose hand?

And why?

Katie, Johnson and Buck — with a big assist from Jeb — help pull together the many threads as Burnette takes her readers on a journey to the surprise ending of a novel not only worth picking up but difficult to put down.

The verdict is in. It’s a whodunit and a page-turner that belongs on a summer reading list.  OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades. She has covered city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

Omnivorous Reader

Dame Agatha’s Mystery

A novel look at Christie’s 11-day disappearance

By Anne Blythe

Dame Agatha Christie, the famed author who wrote 66 detective novels in her 85 years, left the conclusion of one very public mystery untold.

While some details are known about what happened in December 1926 when the prolific writer famously went missing for 11 days, much remains unknown. That has led to an array of books and films in which writers attempt to piece together clues, fill in gaps and offer theories about Christie’s perplexing disappearance.

Nina de Gramont, a creative writing professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, has put forward an intriguing and inventive account in her latest novel, The Christie Affair. She tells her story from the perspective of the mistress who, history tells us, broke up the marriage of Christie and her first husband, Archie.

Here’s what we know from newspaper accounts.

The search for Christie included hundreds of police officers, planes, amateur sleuths on bicycles and in cars, musings from fellow mystery writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, and even a séance at the site where her green Morris Cowley was found deserted in a ditch in the English countryside.

Many theories were posed about what happened to the “lady novelist,” as some journalists described Christie. Was her body at the bottom of the Silent Pool, the lake in Surrey, England, near the abandoned car? Could the mystery writer, not so well-known at the time, be pulling a publicity stunt?

The hunt ended some 200 miles north of Sunningdale, where the author lived with her husband Archie and their daughter, when it was revealed that Christie had checked into the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate using the name Theresa Neele. It was not known at the time by the public, but Neele was the last name of Archie’s mistress, the woman he planned to leave his wife for.

Christie’s only public explanation of her whereabouts came in a February 1928 interview with the Daily Mail, in which she described being in a state of depression after her mother’s death in 1926 and suffering from “private troubles,” which she said she preferred not to get into with the reporter. The Daily Mail reported that Christie contemplated death by suicide several times before driving her car into the remote ditch, hitting something, being flung against the steering wheel and bumping her head. It has long been questioned whether Christie truly had amnesia as the family reported after a public outcry about the extensive search and cost of it when it was revealed the author had been staying in the hotel under an assumed name.

“Up to this moment, I was Mrs. Christie,” she told the Daily Mail.

In her book, Gramont names her narrator Nan O’Dea, a departure from Nancy Neele, the real-life other woman. Without giving short shrift to details of the headline-grabbing disappearance available in newspaper archives around the world, de Gramont devises a double-pronged plot. She alternates between Nan’s account of the days and crucial moments before Christie went missing and a backstory filled with sadness and grief that drives the fictional narrator.

We’re transported from London to Ireland and the worlds of the haves and have-nots amid World War I. We move back and forth between Nan’s early days and her first powerful love in Ireland to Christie’s unraveling marriage and the 11 days that inspired the novel. Slowly, we find out why Nan sets her sights on Archie and aggressively works to woo him away from Agatha to achieve a greater love that becomes clearer as the suspense unravels.

Like the “Queen of Crime,” Gramont has a knack for mystery. She lures her readers in with her first sentence: “A long time ago in another country, I almost killed a woman.”

The North Carolina author also has a gift for leaving subtle signs of what lies ahead, putting pointers in plain sight in the style of Christie.

“Anyone who says I have no regrets is either a psychopath or a liar,” Nan, the narrator, says in the opening chapter when asked by her sister whether she regrets what she did. “I am neither of those things, simply adept at keeping secrets. In this way, the first Mrs. Christie and the second are very much alike. We both know you can’t tell your own story without exposing someone else’s. Her whole life, Agatha refused to answer any questions about the eleven days she was missing, and it wasn’t only because she needed to protect herself. I would have refused to answer, too, if anyone had thought to ask.”

Right at the start, we find out what will become clear in the end — Nan ends up with Archie and Agatha does not.

What we get from de Gramont’s evocative and layered scenes between the beginning and end are often twists, steamy romance, deadpan humor, an unexpected body (as necessary in any Christie mystery) and adventures to old-fashioned villages with a cast of mostly affable, but complicated characters.

“As readers our minds reach toward longed for conclusions,” de Gramont writes as Nan brings her own narrative to a close with an ending that’s not all rosy.

Her storyline for Agatha, though, concludes with a happier image.

“A mystery should end with a killer revealed, and so it has,” de Gramont writes toward the end of her book. “A quest should end with a treasure restored. And so it has. A tragic love story should end with its lovers dead or departed. But a romance. That should end with lovers reunited. Beyond the confines of these pages, life will go tumbling forward. But this is my story. I can make anything happen, unbeholden to a future that now has become the past. I can leave you with a single image, and we pretend it lasts forever. So for this part of the story, let’s stop here.”

The author’s masterful storytelling leaves you longing for more.  OH

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades. She has covered city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.