Historical Mystery
Date Published: 03-01-2022
Publisher: New Arc Books / Level Best Books
It's 1954. The place is Prosperity, North Carolina, a small farming community in Bliss County. Three teenagers, the 1953 championship-winning offensive backfield for Prosperity High, are unwilling participants in a horrific event that results in a young man’s death.
One of the friends harbors a tragic secret that could have prevented the crime. Divulging it would ruin his life, so he stays quiet, fully aware he will carry a stain of guilt for the rest of his life.
The three buddies go their separate ways for almost a decade, before another tragedy brings them back to Prosperity in 1968. Now in their thirties, it is a time of civil and racial unrest in America.
They discover the man who committed murder back in ’54 is now the mayor, and rules the town with an autocratic iron fist. He’s backed by his own private force of sheriff's deputies and forcibly intimidates and silences any malcontents.
Worse, now he's set his sights on Congress.
A Kind and Savage Place spans half a century from 1942 to 1989 and examines the dramatic racial and societal turmoil of that period through the microcosmic lens of a flyspeck North Carolina agricultural community.
Interview with Richard Helms
How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?
A Kind and Savage Place is actually a prequel to my Judd Wheeler Series that was originally published by Five Star beginning in 2010 (Six Mile Creek; Thunder Moon; and Older Than Goodbye). That series is built around the police chief in a small North Carolina farming community that is slowly giving way to suburban sprawl from the large metropolis to the north. I was inspired to write this series when we moved to just such a town in 1993, and I discovered that the community had no police force—or for that matter, a post office. All our mail was delivered by the post office in the next town over, and policing was all handled by the county Sheriff’s Department. I imagined how the town might establish a police force and go about hiring a police chief, and that was the birth of the series. It took another ten years to write the books, during which I was engaged in several other writing projects.
About four years ago, shortly after Older Than Goodbye was published, I began work on the fourth book in the series. It opened with a prologue that took place in 1954, involving Judd’s father and two other friends who had comprised the offensive backfield in the local high school’s 1953 championship-winning team. The prologue stretched to almost ten thousand words, and I realized it was a book all by itself. I expanded the first twenty-two pages into almost a hundred, and the first act was complete. The fourth Judd Wheeler novel was intended to be titled A Kind and Savage Place, so I just kept that title.
As it happens, I have begun the fourth Judd Wheeler novel, and it follows A Kind and Savage Place very closely, answering a few of the questions left hanging in the prequel. The working title is The Dead Never Weep. I hope to finish it in 2023. I have a couple other projects to complete first.
What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?
All of my most successful (award-winning and nominated) stories have had strong sociological themes. Some dealt with the labor and union movement in America in the early 20th century, or with small-town politics and prejudices, or equitable treatment of people regardless of their social status, race, or religion (or lack of religion). Being a Son of the South, with roots in the Carolina soil that extend back to the eighteenth century, I have always written fairly colloquial works alongside my genre fiction. Since about 2012, the majority of my stories have taken place in a single North Carolina county, and many of them in the same town of Prosperity where my fictitious police chief Judd Wheeler lives.
In A Kind and Savage Place, I wanted to examine the evolution of the civil rights movement that I witnessed growing up in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. We lived in Atlanta when Lester Maddox stood in his restaurant doorway wielding an axe handle and daring a person of color to attempt entry. I watched in shame later as the people of Georgia elected this ugly racist man governor. Maddox was the foundation for my antagonist in this novel, Rennie Poole.
We were driving from Atlanta to Charlotte around 1964, and were stopped in a small Georgia town because there as a Ku Klux Klan parade on the main street. I mean, right out in the open. A phalanx of robed and hooded men marched down the center of the town to the cheers of Confederate flag-waving throngs lining the sidewalks. My parents immediately expressed their disgust, and the image remained in my mind for years, so it was inevitable that it would find its way into A Kind and Savage Place.
There have been many novels and stories written about this period of American history. I wanted to examine it using the microcosmic lens of a small North Carolina town being dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world.
What was the hardest part of writing this book?
I have never believed in writing polarized characters. There was a popular poster back in the early 1970s featuring openly bigoted Archie Bunker from the TV show All In The Family that included the line, “There’s a little bit of me in all of youse.” As John D. McDonald wrote in Cinnamon Skin, “There are no hundred percent heroes.” Trying to write characters who are all good or all bad only results in melodrama. So, my protagonists are troubled and conflicted. My antagonists have sincerely held motives beyond simple greed or ambition. Rennie Poole in A Kind and Savage Place is easily the most detestable character I’ve ever written, but he is also committed to doing the very best he can for the citizens of his community, as misguided as his methods might be. I want my villains to have a scintilla of sympathy and my heroes to have feet of clay. Moral ambiguity runs strongly in many of my stories, because my characters are humans, and there are no hundred percent heroes. Writing characters with that level of complexity is like tight-rope walking a razor blade over a vat of alcohol. It’s very easy to go too far in one direction or another. Even so, I dearly enjoy writing tarnished heroes and sympathetic villains.
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
As a lifelong scientist, I truly enjoy research. A Kind and Savage Place covers almost a half of the twentieth century, from 1942 until 1989, though the majority of it takes place in the ‘50s, ‘60’s and ‘70s. That’s a lot of history to research, and I loved almost every minute of it, even the parts that were personally relevant and painful in my past. As is often the case, I wanted to include every tidbit and curious smidgen I could in the novel, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the first draft ran to almost 750 manuscript pages. I was blessed with some wonderful editors who helped me pare it back to the current length, while retaining the zeitgeist of the period in which the story takes place.
Were there alternate endings you considered?
Curiously, never. I always knew how the novel was going to end. I just didn’t know how to get there. I found my way eventually, though!
What genre of books do you enjoy reading?
I’m primarily a crime writer, with an emphasis on private investigators. I was introduced as a young man to the works of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John D. McDonald, Brett Halliday, and later Robert B. Parker, all of which encouraged me to write private eye fiction. I still read a great deal of crime fiction, but I also enjoy the historical fiction of authors like James Michener, Edward Rutherfurd, and Ken Follett. I like police procedurals, especially the Virgil Flowers series by John Sandford, which—like my Judd Wheeler series—takes place primarily in small rural towns. At the moment, I’m snarfing up Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series like popcorn. I also enjoy more mainstream authors such as Joyce Carol Oates, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Norris, John O’Hara, and Richard Brautigan. Brautigan especially contributed to my desire to be a writer when—like my protagonist Jude Pressley—I was a hippie back in the good old days. Since about a year ago, I’ve picked up again with science fiction. I read a great deal of it in the 1970s, before I was waylaid by crime fiction. SF is a pleasant diversion from constant murders in most of my other fiction reading.
So, what’s next?
I’m so glad you asked! Level Best Books’ Historia imprint will release another of my historical novels in May. Vicar Brekonridge is based on my Derringer Award-nominated story “The Cripplegate Apprehension”, which appeared a couple of years ago in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. It’s set in 1843 London and Glasgow, and features one of my most intriguing characters, a former London Metropolitan Police officer who now makes a living as a thief-taker, which is sort of a cross between a private detective and a bounty hunter.
Vicar Brekonridge is based on the strange case of Daniel M’Naghten, who in 1843 gunned down Prime Minister Robert Peel’s private secretary on the streets of Whitehall, believing he was assassinating Peel himself. The M’Naghten trial set legal precedents regarding the insanity plea that still resonate to this day, and the “M’Naghten Rule” is still the standard for establishing insanity in 23 states almost two hundred years later. What makes this even stranger is that there is a mountain of evidence that M’Naghten himself—despite being found not guilty by reason of insanity—might have actually been a cagey hired killer who found a novel way to avoid the gibbet by spending the rest of his life in a mental hospital. In my reimagining of the M’Naghten case, his attorney Alexander Cockburn hires thief-taker Vicar Brekonridge to travel to M’Naghten’s home town of Glasgow to gather evidence of his insanity to be presented at trial. What Brekonridge discovers, instead, convinces him of a far more sinister motive.
Vicar Brekonridge will be published in May.
I also have a new private eye series that will debut probably in 2003, set in modern-day Charleston, SC, featuring a detective named Whitlock (no first name). The first book in that series, Holy City, is completed, and I’m working on several more titles. All in all, I’m staying busy!
Thanks for hosting me today! It was a pleasure chatting with your readers!
Richard Helms is a retired college professor and forensic psychologist. He has been nominated eight times for the SMFS Derringer Award, winning it twice; seven times for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award, with one win; twice for the ITW Thriller Award, with one win; four times for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award with one win: and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He was a contributor to the Bouchercon Anthony Award-nominated anthology The Eyes of Texas: Private Eyes from the Panhandle to the Piney Woods. His story in that anthology, “See Humble and Die”, was selected for Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2020, edited by Otto Penzler and C.J. Box. He is a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, along with other periodicals and short story anthologies. Mr. Helms is a former member of the Board of Directors of Mystery Writers of America, and the former president of the Southeast Regional Chapter of MWA. When not writing, Mr. Helms enjoys playing with his grandsons, travel, reading, gourmet cooking, simracing, and rooting for his beloved Carolina Tar Heels and Carolina Panthers. Richard Helms and his wife Elaine live in Charlotte, North Carolina. A Kind and Savage Place is his twenty-second novel
About the Author
Richard Helms is a retired college professor and forensic psychologist. He has been nominated eight times for the SMFS Derringer Award, winning it twice; seven times for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award, with a win in 2021; twice for the ITW Thriller Award, with one win; four times for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award with one win: and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He is a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, along with other periodicals and short story anthologies. His story “See Humble and Die” was included in Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2020. A Kind and Savage Place is his twenty-second novel. Mr. Helms is a former member of the Board of Directors of Mystery Writers of America, and the former president of the Southeast Regional Chapter of MWA. When not writing, Mr. Helms enjoys travel, gourmet cooking, simracing, rooting for his beloved Carolina Tar Heels and Carolina Panthers, and playing with his grandsons. Richard Helms and his wife Elaine live in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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