Creating the truth

Sharyn McCrumb's 2010 novel The Devil Amongst the Lawyers is actually more about the devil amongst the newspaper reporters. It is based loosely on an actual murder case from the 1930s.

Reporters gather in little Wise, Va., less because the case is interesting than because the defendant, Erma Morton, is young and pretty. She is a schoolteacher accused of killing her drunken father. Because she is young and pretty, Erma expects the all-male jury to acquit her.

The trial itself occupies little of the novel. Mostly we read about three reporters and one photographer covering the trial.

Henry Jernigan is a big-name New York reporter known for his flowery prose. Yet Henry cannot focus his mind on the murder trial, for he is preoccupied with a tragedy he witnessed during his years of retreat in Japan.

Rose Hanlon, also from the big city, is considered a sob sister. Shade Baker, the photographer, works mostly outside the courtroom, getting pictures of principals entering or leaving, as well as shots of the surrounding countryside.

The fourth journalist, Carl Jennings,  is a young man from the mountains still trying to make his name with a nearby newspaper.

The New York reporters sound like they could be working for the New York Times today, less interested in truth than in the story they want their readers to believe or the story their readers already believe. McCrumb stresses this point to excess, giving us line after line of Henry and Rose's cynical attitude toward truth"

"America expects things to be backward up here. So we're just showing people what they already know to be true."

"The truth is just what everybody believes."

"Truth is what you can convince people to believe."

"They wouldn't believe the truth if I told 'em, and they wouldn't like it if they did."

And so on.

Shade is directed to get pictures of hicks living in shacks, even though he finds it a challenge finding either. They are disappointed that most people in Wise seem pretty much like most people back East.

Only Carl attempts to tell the true story, yet he ultimately gets fired because his stories lack the color of the big-city reporters.

McCrumb flirts with the supernatural in her novel, yet she is the one who seems prophetic.