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2015
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
a review by Joseph Horst Ruth Moose. Doing It at the Dixie Dew: A Mystery. New York: Minotaur Books, 2014.
JOSEPH HORST teaches English at ECU, where he received his MA with a concentration in creative writing in 2005. His short story “Old Glory” was published in the Slippery Elm literary journal in 2013. His full-length play Enemies was produced in 2008 by a partnership with the Magnolia Arts Center in Greenville, NC, and his ten-minute play “Calliope” was performed in Napa, CA, in 2012, in the inaugural 8x10: 10-Minute Play Festival, sponsored by the Napa Valley Playhouse. A native North Carolinian, RUTH MOOSE was a member of the Creative Writing faculty at UNC Chapel Hill for fifteen years and now lives in Pittsboro, NC. She has a BA from Pfeiffer University in Misenheimer, NC, and an MLS from UNC Greensboro, and she did post-graduate work at the Universities of Virginia and Massachusetts, Shenandoah University, and Oxford University in England. Doing it at the Dixie Dew, her first novel, won the 2013 Minotaur Books/Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Award, and St. Martin’s Press is publishing a second “Dixie Dew” novel, Wedding Bell Blues, in 2015. Moose has published three collections of short stories, The Wreath Ribbon Quilt (St. Andrews Press, 1987; August House, 1989), Dreaming in Color (August House, 1989), and Neighbors and Other Strangers (Main Street Rag, 2012). Read her short story “Playing Baby Dolls with the Girls” in NCLR 2002. Her stories have been published in Holland, South Africa, England, and Demark, as well as the US. Her honors include a MacDowell Fellowship and a Chapman Family Teaching Award.
COURTESY OF ST. MARTIN’S PUBLISHING GROUP; JACKET DESIGN BY DAVID BALDEOSINGH ROTSTEIN, ILLUSTRATION BY TOM HALLMAN
COZY UP WITH A NEW SOUTHERN MYSTERY
“People don’t go to a bed-andbreakfast to die, do they?” With that opening line, Ruth Moose’s first novel delves into the “cozy mystery” genre based in the fictitious town of Littleboro, NC. Winner of the 2013 Minotaur Books/ Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, Doing It at the Dixie Dew proves to be a worthy contribution to the genre and highlights the smalltown Southern culture that seems to fade with each passing year. Beth Mckenzie Henry, born and raised in Littleboro, NC, returns home when her grandmother Margaret Alice (or Mama Alice, as she’s affectionately known) falls down the basement stairs. After Mama Alice’s death, Beth inherits the big house with its wraparound porch and decides to convert it into a bed-and-breakfast. The expenses of this endeavor aren’t the only major problem Beth faces with this decision. The first one is when Lavinia Lovingood, a member of one of the town’s founding families, returns to Littleboro and dies in the Azalea Room at Beth’s B&B. When Beth later discovers the strangled body of the local priest in his church and the police determine Lavinia was poisoned, suspicions start to mount, and Beth unwittingly starts searching for answers. Beth’s inquiries tangle her in a web of old-town politics, jealousy, and physical danger that she and her best friend from high school, Malinda Jones, must work through and escape from before they become the next victims. Doing It at the Dixie Dew, even with its tongue-in-cheek title, fits very neatly into the “cozy mystery”
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genre and has been compared to works by Carolyn Haines and Joan Hess. As described in a 1992 New York Times article, the genre usually includes works whose protagonists are female and settings are based in homey, quaint locales like the fictitious Littleboro, NC.* Any sex and violence in a cozy mystery is alluded to rather than given in graphic detail; Beth’s eventual night with her handyman/love interest Scott Smith is dispatched within a page of the book with vague dialogue reminiscent of a 1930s movie constrained by moral codes. Though some of Moose’s characters are broad swipes of the pen with almost no individual characterization (the handyman is a good example), the author has an excellent handle on the dialogue of her Southern characters, such as Mama Alice’s mantra, “‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without’” (123). Moose also deftly
* Marilyn Stasio. “Crime/mystery: Murder Least Foul: The Crazy, Soft-boiled Mystery,” New York Times 18 Oct. 1992: web.