Story slug: 092715 scribe
FICTION
‘The Scribe’
By Matthew Guinn
W.W. Norton
289 pages, $25.95.
Early in Matthew Guinn’s historical thriller “The Scribe,” famed Atlanta journalist Henry Grady addresses a group of the city’s businessmen called “The Ring.” The novel takes place against the backdrop of the International Cotton Expo of 1881, and Grady builds up the event as a chance for Atlanta and the rest of the South to rebrand itself following the end of the Civil War 16 years earlier.
Possibly for the first time, Grady uses imagery familiar to present-day Atlantans: “Our story begins with the Atlanta Spirit, which lifted us, phoenix-like, from the ashes of a devastated city and brought us to this point, whence we will stage an exhibition fit to astonish the nations.” Writers and politicians have trotted out the phoenix metaphor to describe Atlanta ever since.
During the Reconstruction era, the New South made a comeback as a region built on commerce and industry, but “The Scribe” also explores a simultaneous attempt to whitewash the lingering racial violence and inequities. An Edgar Award nominee for his first novel, “The Resurrectionist,” Guinn chooses a rich, complex setting for his book, a city desperate to put its past behind it, despite the constant, implicit threat of vicious suppression for non-white citizens.
“The Scribe’s” characters have vivid, first-hand memories of slave plantation atrocities and Civil War tragedies, including the siege of Atlanta. The freshness of history frequently provides the book’s most compelling aspects, even though Guinn never adequately exploits the past to its full potential.
At first a 19th century police procedural, the novel’s plot involves a serial killer preying upon Atlanta’s successful black citizens in a horrific fashion, which includes carving letters into the bodies – hence the title “The Scribe.” Concerned that the crimes will besmirch Atlanta’s reputation at the eve of the Expo, the chief of police brings in former detective Thomas Canby to investigate.
Canby left the Atlanta police force years earlier under a cloud of scandal, and hopes solving the case will restore his good name. Canby teams with Cyrus Underwood, the city’s first African-American officer, but looks to his new partner less for his expertise with the black community than as a possible suspect.
The investigation takes the detectives on a tour of Reconstruction-era Atlanta, including such locales as Vinings Mountain, Pace’s ferry and Decatur, and presents encounters with historical figures such as Joel Chandler Harris. Like many historical novels, the book winks to present-day readers, as when one character predicts, “Someday there’ll be settled development all the way out to Buckhead.”
Perhaps the best location is the Cotton Expo itself, with massive exhibits of factory equipment meant to put the Old South’s agrarian system to rest. At times, “The Scribe” proves reminiscent of Erik Larson’s nonfiction bestseller “The Devil in the White City,” which juxtaposed the creation of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair with the pursuit of a notorious murderer. In both books, the public exhibition proves as compelling as the criminal aspects.
The mystery takes an unexpected detour when one of crimes seems to break the killer’s pattern – and turns out to be a lightly fictionalized depiction of one of Atlanta’s most notorious real crimes from the early 1910s. Given the liberties historical novelists can take with the public record, transposing the case doesn’t create any glaring anachronisms. But it definitely seems inconsistent with the murderer’s goals and motives when they come to light, so the creative choice never seems fully justified.
Though overburdened by haunting incidents from his past, Canby emerges as a credibly flawed character, prone to anger, hard-drinking and poor judgment. He and Underwood have a familiar dynamic as mismatched police officers with clashing personalities, as Underwood’s religious faith bumps up against Canby’s acerbic skepticism. They come to a mutual respect, but Canby’s slow thaw feels true to a man of his era and prejudices.
Apart from that pair, though, “The Scribe’s” characters feel like a stock ensemble of sinister businessmen, racist brutes, a dutiful love interest, etc. Seldom do they seem to have vivid lives that continue when they’re off the plot’s stage, although Henry Grady makes an exception as a moral crusader and civic booster.
In the book’s latter third, the legal and historic verisimilitude gives way to a more Gothic mood, comparable to a Victorian-era version of the movie “Se7en.” The prose grows more vivid and the narrative builds momentum, suggesting that Guinn’s greatest enthusiasm emerges when the story shifts to dungeon-like prison cells and open graves at the dead of night. The narrative even builds to an exciting chase between a speeding horse and an overheated train that might as well involve the forces of hell.
But when the story shifts to discussions of evil and hints at the supernatural, Guinn seems to be overreaching. It’s as if he wants to make a deeper, more profound point about the human capacity for cruelty, but the observations feel more abstract than the damningly factual accounts of death in war or under slavery. It’s like the book shifts from an unflinching historical account to a Penny Dreadful horror story.
Nevertheless, the murder investigation provides an effective entry point to Guinn’s portrayal of the Reconstruction era, which set up tensions in American race relations and Southern identity that continue to this day. As an added bonus, “The Scribe” gives Atlantans a chance to envision the car-free streets of their hometown more than a century ago.
