The publication of Sharyn McCrumb’s new “ballad novel,” The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, will be celebrated at a special event at Barter Theatre on Wednesday, June 23, at 7:30 p.m., the day after its national release. The event is co-sponsored by Barter Theatre and the Friends of the Washington County Public Library.

McCrumb will read from the novel and discuss its development. Musicians Nicholas Piper, Eugene Wolf, and Gill Braswell will sing some of the traditional ballads that were inspiration for the novel.  The title of the new novel is a variant of the traditional fiddle tune, “The Devil’s Dream.” There will be book sales and signing after the event.

This is McCrumb’s first novel to be set primarily in far Southwest Virginia, primarily Wise and Pound, but also Abingdon and Bristol.

The actual historical event at the center of the new novel is the murder of Trigg Maxwell in 1935 in Pound. The accused murderer was his 21-year-old daughter, Edith, a teacher at the elementary school and a recent graduate of Radford College. The national media latched onto the trial of Edith Maxwell, sending some of their best reporters to the area to sensationalize the “wronged woman on trial” against the backdrop of the backwardness and poverty of mountain life.

While the novel revolves around the trial of Maxwell, the name fictionalized to Erma Morton, the focus in the work is on the big-city reporters who have been sent from New York to cover the trial. The central character is Henry Jernigan who has had to lower his literary standards during the Depression to write sensational journalism. A sob sister (as female journalists were referred to in that era), Rose Hanelon from the New York Herald Tribune, is assigned to describe the beautiful and innocent victims in each story. Her philosophy of journalism is that “Nobody deals in truth . . . . Truth is what you can convince people to believe.”

The hero of the novel is Carl Jennings, a young reporter for the Johnson City newspaper, who, realizing that Erma Morton has come from a similar background as he, files accurate reports of the trial as well as accurate portrayals of the people from the Wise and Pound communities.

McCrumb’s ballad novels are based on actual historical events, which allow her to do historical research and re-create a period in time and an actual place. However, she also is interested in contemporary social, environmental, and political events. In The Devil Amongst the Lawyers, McCrumb is observing that many of the negative stereotypes of the Appalachian region came from the distorted, sensationalized reporting by outsiders in the early part of the 20th century.

McCrumb’s other ballad novels include She Walks These Hills and The Rosewood Casket, which deal with the issue of the vanishing wilderness; The Ballad of Frankie Silver, the story of the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina; The Songcatcher, a genealogy in music; and Ghost Riders, an account of the Civil War in the Appalachians. A film of her novel The Rosewood Casket is currently in production, directed by British Academy Award nominee Roberto Schaefer.

Admission to the event is $10. There will be open seating so there is no need to make reservations. If you have any questions about the event, you can call the Barter Theatre Box Office at 276.628.3991.