Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 14, 1995 TAG: 9506140050
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEANNE JOHNSON DUDZIAK SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"It's an apt description as far as it goes, but it's one I feel I've outgrown," she says.
Because some of her books are satirical mystery novels, McCrumb feels that the New York publishing world likes to pigeonhole her as a mystery writer, which detracts from literary appreciation of her work.
"If a book is tedious and monotonous, people assume it must be significant," she says. "But if it's enjoyable and tells a good story, they dismiss it as pop fiction. Because some of my books are humorous, people think that gives them permission to read them with their brains in neutral. But if you do that, I'll run right over you."
McCrumb is an internationally known writer with 13 books to her credit. Some, including the Edgar-winning "Bimbos of the Death Sun," recount the offbeat and often amusing adventures of amateur detective Elizabeth MacPherson. McCrumb also has written a series of more serious books with Appalachian Mountain settings.
She has won the Edgar Award, an Agatha Award, several New York Times and Los Angeles Times Notable Books mentions and an impressive collection of critical accolades.
The New York Times Book Review said, "Ms. McCrumb writes with quiet fire and maybe a little mountain magic."
The author feels that humor allows her to look at serious issues without engendering either defensiveness or boredom. For instance, her latest book, "If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him...," is a sort of feminist manifesto with interwoven stories that poke fun at the pranks of badly behaved, testosterone-driven males.
One of the characters, Eleanor Royden, releases some of her venom by spitting deliciously scathing invective at a high-powered husband who left her for a trophy wife.
Eleanor is described as having placed the following personal ad in the Roanoke Times: "Prosperous Roanoke lawyer, long on financial assets, short on physical ones, seeks golddigging bimbo to jazz up his briefs. Preference given to sluts named Staci."
Yet the book also pokes fun at radical feminism, and when McCrumb is asked if she considers the novel a feminist book, she hesitates. "There's something about that book," she says. "Eleanor gets to say outrageous things. And whether or not you agree with her, at least it's out there."
McCrumb says the book must have struck a chord because 20,000 hardcover copies were sold the day they were published.
She originally wanted to name the book after a line that was overheard from a battered woman: "If I'd killed him when I met him, I'd be out of prison now." Her editors decided to shorten it.
McCrumb, 47, lives in Shaws-ville with her husband and three children. Born in North Carolina, she is the offspring of a Southern debutante mother and a mountain-man father who passed on a love for Appalachian story-telling. She is a quick-witted, wise-cracking Earth Mother/Country Girl with a penchant for poetic analysis. She's also an inherently curious person who meticulously researches everything from geological history to regional preferences in potato salad.
She graduated from the University of North Carolina and worked as a newspaper reporter and editor before enrolling as a graduate student in English at Virginia Tech in the late 1970s.
Most of the novelist's characters come from her imagination or are loosely inspired by real events. The main plot in "If I'd Killed Him..." closely parallels a notorious local story involving a polygamous self-styled preacher, his wife of many years and a barely legal teen-ager who becomes Wife Number 2.
In McCrumb's version of events, there's a debatably nasty twist: The preacher ends up dead and his original wife is charged with murder.
"My editors in New York and London ask me 'Where do you get this stuff?', says McCrumb. "I tell them that a subscription to the Roanoke Times can be very useful."
Despite murderous plots and colorful characters, McCrumb's books generally present positive portrayals of Appalachian life. That's no accident. Her books contain a wealth of information about Appalachian folk tales, music and even Civil War history. It is presented though multidimensional characters who defy the Hollywood stereotypes.
For instance, "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" is rich in both literal and subliminal Appalachian imagery. The book's subplots include a polluted river, a dying celebrity and a latent miscarriage.
"All of these images were floating around in my head like a collage and I couldn't figure out what they had to do with each other until I realized that they all had their roots in Celtic culture," says McCrumb. "They're all in a transitional kind of twilight or 'luminality' where they're neither completely dead or alive. This fits with ancient Celtic religious beliefs in the power of borders - the borders between seasons, day and night, life and death, heaven and hell."
"Hangman" and the other books in the group known as the Ballad Series are decidedly less saucy and more lyrical than her first two novels, which were written while McCrumb was pregnant and going to graduate school at Virginia Tech, where she also taught journalism and worked as a film librarian.
"People ask me how come there's such a quantum leap between books like 'Bimbos of the Death Sun' and 'If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O.' I tell them it's amazing what you can do when you're not pregnant."
McCrumb thinks she writes the same kind of books Jane Austen would write were she alive today, because Austen would need to add mystery or other literary devices to avoid being classified as a romance novelist.
"Otherwise," says McCrumb, "her books would end up with Fabio on the cover."
Even sans Fabio, McCrumb has established an international reputation that has led her on many book and lecture tours. Among her stops: Oxford University, The Smithsonian Institution, the American Library in Berlin and the University of Bonn.
"Sometimes it seems like I'm famous everywhere except here," she says.
Some information in this article was supplied by the Associated Press
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB