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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
the Hatteras Island men at war, drawing out the personal details that show how these young men, also caught up in events beyond their control or comprehension, are made into the old men Nick encounters in 1991. Likewise, the story of Caroline Dant, hinted at in the early pages of the novel and then realized as Gerard brings the
story full circle at the end, is a tragedy worthy of more space. In the course of his time on the island, Nick meets and is fascinated by Julia Royal, the granddaughter of the community’s most successful founder. Having left the island but then returned to take care of the family’s businesses there, Julia is in many ways Nick’s contrast. Where-
as he is always leaving places, she is rooted in hers, and she identifies in their contrast what she most wants: “Two things impossible to have at once . . . To stay . . . And to leave” (250). In the end, both Julia and Nick find their loyalties have been shaken and their allegiances shifted, and as Nick finds
MARGARET MARON: FIRST MYSTERY WRITER IN THE NORTH CAROLINA LITERARY HALL OF FAME induction presentation remarks by Bland Simpson Weymouth Center for the Arts, Southern Pines, North Carolina, 16 October 2016
Not too many years ago, when the North Carolina Writers Conference meeting in Smithfield celebrated Johnston County native-daughter Margaret Maron as our honoree, I was moved to draft a chorus lyric based upon the thoughtful, homophonically admonitory name of her well-known and much-loved leading lady, Judge Deborah Knott: Judge not, Not unless you want to be judged Not like you want to be judged By Judge Knott
Drawing upon the New Testament chapter and verse of Matthew 7, Margaret Maron, surely one of the most prolific high-quality and high-profile authors in our state’s literary history, is also one of its most deeply empathetic. She certainly has shown great empathy for us, her readers, as she has kept us well supplied with almost a new book a year. For even the most inspired of scribes, this is a very demanding pace of writing and revision, followed by the many details of book-production and bookpromotion, all while the next work is in the making. The only way Margaret could have done this work and involved readers the way she has, with Deborah Knott and kith and kin, including her friend, Beau, and
husband Dwight (he who passes judgments with such comments as “Sweet like a buzz saw”) – is for her to have had an ingrained, river-deep, mountain-high empathy and love both for her characters and for the real and varied people of North Carolina they are drawn from and represent; a deep, downhome feeling for the lives her characters lead (some by choice, some by force of circumstance so strong it may as well be called fate) and the predicaments her characters get or are gotten into. In both her Sigrid Harald and Deborah Knott series, Margaret Maron follows a great and honored tradition. Edgar Allan Poe wrote mysteries, so did Dorothy Sayers, and so, too, did William Faulkner – Faulkner’s Knight’s Gambit tales feature a central character who, like Margaret’s Judge Knott, is also a member of the legal world: Yoknapatawpha County attorney Gavin Stephens. Margaret employs an extraordinarily clever point of view, a narrator who as a visiting, special-assignment judge can be positioned in whatever community the author wishes to explore through the riddles of crime – (smalltime carnival life, a judicial conference near the seaside, migrant Hispanic farmworkers, the turners andburners of our Piedmont pottery tradition, for example). In this way, she has created a social and geographical map overlaying the real North Carolina, one that, though fictional,