Local Murder Inspires New Novel

Inspired by a 1959 murder in a tiny, remote river town south of Washington, DC, Southern Maryland journalist Viki Volk has published her first novel, Murder First Then Slander, based upon news accounts of the still festering crime.

Murder First Then Slander

100 sets of fingerprints in a dead woman’s bedroom

From the book’s author:

Without the words that appear here in bold, the disclaimer below appears in the front of my book.

Murder First, Then Slander is a work of fiction based upon actual events as reported in news accounts but grotesquely changed for excessively dramatic purposes. All incidents, dialogue, and characters are products of the author’s wild imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s excessively wild imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

That is the truth about the novel. It’s fake. I made it up. But I hung it on the framework of a real murder in a small town in 1959. Nosing about, 60 years later, I found folks can still come up with her name. But before anything comes up about the murder, they mention the fingerprints.

The murder/rape was salacious in its own right. Local and state newspapers carried relatively lurid details. But it wasn’t the crime that captured me either. It was the power of talk. What held across time was the memory of a ruination, not so much the murder. Gossiping about a dead woman had transformed her from the victim into the wrongdoer.

Now that grabbed me.

So I made up Harriet Love Nelson and gave her a chance to talk, talk, talk right back.

Order here, paperback or electronic version of Murder First Then Slander.