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Author and librarian Cheryl Ryan Harshman of Wheeling has shown how two novelists can take the same real-life incident and use it as the inspiration for completely different books.
Speaking at Lunch With Books at the Ohio County Public Library Tuesday, Harshman discussed how infamous murders committed in West Virginia in 1931 provided an idea to Moundsville native Davis Grubb (1919-80) for his 1953 novel, "The Night of the Hunter." Sixty years later, West Virginia novelist Jayne Anne Phillips retold the story of the actual murders in her 2013 novel, "Quiet Dell." Harshman said she finds it fascinating that both novelists got ideas from the horrifying crimes and took them "in very different directions."
Harshman's program was part of the Upper Ohio Valley Festival of Books, which was slated to conclude Saturday with a presentation by Phillips, whose fifth novel is based on the brutal killings by con man Harry Powers in Quiet Dell, W.Va.
While Phillips' work is a retelling of the crimes, Grubb's novel is completely fictional. In addition to getting his initial idea from the homicides, Grubb drew upon incidents in his own childhood for plot twists, Harshman said. "The Night of the Hunter" was adapted into a 1955 film.
Harshman urged the audience to read and re-read "The Night of the Hunter." She commented, "His (Grubb's) writing is incredible … This book is a neglected masterpiece. It is so contemporary. It is so beautifully written."
Grubb's childhood home, which is still standing on Seventh Street in Moundsville, "was very, very important to him, because they didn't get to stay so long," she said.
The prosperous Grubb family founded the Mercantile Bank in Moundsville. However, Harshman said, "The family fortunes were greatly reduced by the Depression. His family was evicted out of this home. It was very traumatic for a little boy."
Grubb's later writing reflected "a cry against a powerful, capitalistic society that would take away his father's livelihood at the Mercantile Bank and take away his cherished family home," Harshman observed.
After Grubb's father died, his mother went to work for the welfare agency in the late 1920s, traveling the back ridges of Marshall County to help poor families and children. Her accounts of those visits provided "early memories that Davis Grubb put into his writing," Harshman said.
Grubb wanted to be a painter, but he was color-blind. "Instead, he turned his storytelling talents to writing," she said. He wrote a script for a radio show in Clarksburg in 1939, then had a story, "The Lollipop Tree," published in Good Housekeeping magazine in 1944.
"The Night of the Hunter," published by Harper Brothers and by Reader's Digest as a condensed book, is "a truly American gothic novel," she said. It may fit into the Southern gothic genre, which "uses suspense to explore social issues and character of a region," she added.
The 1931 murders spawned an international media frenzy, Harshman said, as she showed several sensational newspaper clippings. The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph called Powers a "love racketeer," while the Clarksburg Telegram described the crimes as mail-order murders.
Powers was convicted of first-degree murder in Harrison County, W.Va., and was hanged at the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville at 9 p.m. on March 18, 1932. Grubb, who grew up in the shadow of the prison, began his novel at Cresap's Landing along the Ohio River and depicted his villain as an inmate from the penitentiary, Harshman said.