The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (review)

In 1935, Edith Maxwell, a 22 year-old central Appalachian teacher, was accused of first-degree murder for killing her father, Trigg, resulting in a sensationalist story that reached all the way to the White House. Maxwell’s case was chronicled in Appalachia native Sharon Hatfield’s Never Seen the Moon: the Trials of Edith Maxwell (University of Illinois Press, 2005), a study of Depression-era journalism and the historical changes Maxwell’s trials could have brought about—particularly for women—if not for melodramatic newspaper accounts that may have altered public perception and outcomes. Sharyn McCrumb’s dramatization of the story in The Devil Amongst the Lawyers is thematically similar but goes further in examining the lives and motives of the characters drawn to the case.

In McCrumb’s novel, Erma Morton is a beautiful young teacher from Pound, Virginia, whose notoriety as an accused murderer attracts journalists to the mountains of Wise County and a story steeped in issues similar to Maxwell’s, such as an abusive, alcoholic father and an imaginary mountain “code” that dictates how people should live. It quickly becomes clear that there is a greater truth at stake than Morton’s guilt or innocence. The journalists take on the roles of prosecution and defense, not only in how they choose to describe Morton in print but in how Appalachia and its people will be depicted based on the journalists’ misguided perception of a region stereotyped by local color writers of the mid-19^th to early 20^th centuries. McCrumb takes aim at the practice of “yellow journalism” that contributed to what remains for some a persistent image of poor, backwoods, uncivilized Appalachia.

McCrumb’s novel is seasoned with bits of regional history that intersect with the lives of her principal characters, who tell a story infused with their own biases. The novel opens with the famous 1916 hanging of Mary, the circus elephant in Erwin, Tennessee. Carl Jennings, a fledgling reporter from east Tennessee and the only journalist with a proclivity for truth, listens as a veteran reporter recalls his influence on the fate of an elephant that was publicly hanged for killing her trainer. “Hell, son,” the old reporter says, “the pen isn’t mightier than the sword. It is the sword.” Here, McCrumb cleverly reveals journalists’ power and the flawed reasoning of readers who fall under their spell, which sets an ominous tone for the rest of the novel.

In his search for the truth, Jennings must negotiate several obstacles, including big-city reporters Henry Jernigan, Rose Hanelon and photographer Shade Baker, as well as Morton’s own brother, Harley. But Jennings believes he has the advantage in his cousin, young Nora Bonesteel, who is gifted with the Sight and who travels to Wise to help Jennings find the truth. In these interludes, McCrumb weaves a thrilling thread of magical realism throughout the story, holding the reader’s attention as Bonesteel reveals hints of past and future.

Frustrated by the lack of “shacks . . . and ignorant rustics” that they were expecting, Hanelon, Baker and Jernigan spend the majority of their time in Wise County trying to manufacture an Appalachia that the reading public—and their editors—expect as a result of the movie, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, based on the John Fox, Jr. novel published in 1908. (In Jernigan’s opening scene he is trying to read the novel for “research.”) Hanelon encourages Baker to stage photographs of “a bunch of dirty children in rags on a sagging wooden porch,” which, she says, “would be a money shot for sure.” Though he succumbs to the pressures of his colleague and takes the pictures, Baker—like Jennings—seems to be conflicted about the difference between the reality he sees and photographs he is supposed to get. He feels a “twinge of admiration,” in the children he poses for photographs, “a distant echo of his own rural upbringing.”

The female protagonists seem unable to rise above their circumstances, if only in...