THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410200348
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DOUGLAS G. GREENE
LENGTH: Long : 141 lines
THE BODY FARM
PATRICIA CORNWELL
Charles Scribner's Sons. 387 pp. $23.
SHE WALKS THESE HILLS
SHARYN MCCRUMB
Charles Scribner's Sons. 336 pp. $21.
Virginians have long claimed Edgar Allan Poe as one of their native writers, and thus (with only slight bows to all of Poe's other home states) Virginia can be said to have sired detective fiction when Poe wrote ``The Murders in the Rue Morgue'' in 1841.
Unfortunately, in the century and a half since, few Virginians contributed to the genre, although some authors (mostly Northerners) occasionally set their mystery novels in Virginia.
For example, I have a ragged dime novel from the 1880s titled Old Man Bruce, The Richmond Detective. More significant, and much better written, were the classic Uncle Abner mysteries by West Virginian Melville Davisson Post.
Virginia locales were also colorfully used by, among others, Leslie Ford, who was once a mainstay of The American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, and Northern Virginia has been the home of numerous fictional thrillers, as the world has frequently been blown up, or at least threatened, around Arlington and Falls Church. But Virginians themselves were rarely the authors of the books.
This situation has gradually begun to change. During the 1980s, Doug Hornig wrote some fine private-eye novels set in Charlottesville, which those of us in Tidewater know is replete with unsavory types. Another Virginian, Carol Clemeau, wrote an excellent academic mystery, The Ariadne Clue, about 12 years ago, but she has never written another. W. Edward Blain, who teaches at Virginia's Woodbury Forest School, has recently written two well-received detective novels set in private schools.
Lately, though, two Virginians have broken out of the pack, one (Patricia Cornwell) a regular on the best-seller list and the other (Sharyn McCrumb) about to appear on it - if, that is, there is any justice in book sales. Both have new books this autumn, and they illustrate the differing paths of detective fiction, from an emphasis on technology to a moody lyricism.
Cornwell's The Body Farm has all of her strengths: her narrative pace, her quickly sketched but believable characters and her understanding of the high-tech world of forensics. When Cornwell burst on the scene with Postmortem in 1990, it was clear that she was able to include scenes that, in less capable hands, would be condemned as graphic. She describes autopsies with such care and with such a feeling of the excitement of scientific discovery that the reader (or at least most readers) does not become offended at such clinical points as the sagging of the face when the scalp is removed.
In The Body Farm, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for Virginia, believes that a serial killer who has previously claimed Virginia victims is on the loose in the hill country of North Carolina. Because she has dealt with that killer before, Scarpetta becomes involved and, with the cast of characters from the previous books (Pete Marino and Wesley Benton), she requests that the body of the victim, an 11-year-old girl, be exhumed.
Cornwell's readers are accustomed to Scarpetta's cases becoming intertwined with her personal life, and The Body Farm is no exception. She finds herself drawn sexually both to the foul-mouthed and foul-tempered Marino and to the smooth, but happily married, Benton.
Meanwhile, her niece, who is interning at the FBI, has been accused of taking unauthorized access to confidential files. The niece has her own problems with relationships. . . well, you get the picture: Lots of things happen in The Body Farm - so many that Cornwell's fans will have to wait until the next novel to see some of them resolved.
Unlike some of Cornwell's earlier books, which introduce the murderer too late in the story for complete fairness, the criminal and the motive, as well as the key indications, appear in time for the reader to try to unravel the problem. In addition, the gimmick in the framing of Scarpetta's niece is expertly handled - so much so that most readers will be uncomfortable about putting full faith and credence into fingerprint evidence.
Cornwell writes in a no-nonsense, straightforward style. Even in the hills of Appalachia, she finds technology more interesting than local cultural patterns. One of the few unsuccessful parts of the book is the unsympathetic depiction of the poverty-stricken people we used to call ``hillbillies.'' Scarpetta even thinks it's natural to ask them whether they have ever heard of a medical doctor.
Sharyn McCrumb, on the other hand, writes with a lyrical, indirect style, and her heart is with the hill people, whose culture she sees as a complex, interrelated collection of values and traditions. A teacher of Appalachian studies at Virginia Tech and a North Carolina native, she believes that the past is just as important as the present and that it is still, in the literal sense, real.
She Walks These Hills, the fourth book in McCrumb's ``ballad'' series (If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter), is not based on folk music but on 18th- and 19th-century Methodist hymns. The story begins with a modern sighting of a ghostly wraith, the spirit of a young woman who escaped from Indian captivity 220 years ago, only to return to a greater tragedy. Because the hill people believe the ghost is real, it is real throughout the story, even intervening in the plot.
One of McCrumb's powers is that she can make the reader accept both the supernatural and the rational. Effortlessly controlling the ebb and flow of various lives, she combines them into a single tale.
Hiram (pronounced ``Harm'') Sorley, imprisoned for life for a murder he may not have committed, has lost all memory of the present. Escaping from prison, he lives like the 18th-century ghost as he tries to find his own home. His wife, however, remarried long ago, and his daughter has become a young woman. Meanwhile, a young instructor at Virginia Tech has decided to follow the route of the 18th-century woman, and his path weaves in and out with Hiram's. Also involved is the local deejay, ``Hank the Yank,'' who believes that Hiram was railroaded into prison, and makes the old man into a folk hero. Sheriff Spencer Arrowood and Deputy Martha Ayers are not greatly worried about Hiram and are partly sympathetic with his escape, until the old man's former wife is found murdered in their broken-down trailer.
The solution to the murder is well-handled, though I suspect that most readers will reach it before Arrowood and Ayers. But it's not so much the solution to the murder as the resolution to the dilemmas of the characters that is important. At the end of the book, we find that the 18th-century tragedy connects to the 20th-century deaths, that the folklore unfolds like a real modern crime investigation, and that we rarely can escape who we are, although we can discover our identities and live with ourselves.
She Walks These Hills is not only a carefully crafted detective story, it is also a powerful regional novel that says a great deal about who we are and how we all end up walking these hills. MEMO: Douglas G. Greene, director of the Institute of Humanities at Old
Dominion University in Norfolk, also directs a small publishing house,
Crippen & Landru, specializing in detective fiction. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Patricia Cornwell
Sharyn McCrumb
Jacket design by CORSILLO/MANZONE
Jacket design by WENDY BASS
Jacket illustration by MARC BURCKHARDT
by CNB