Author’s novels mine opioid-ravaged West Virginia
Julia Keller and her rescue dog, Eddie — mostly a mix of Labrador retriever and pit bull — sat recently on the shaded porch that wraps around her home northeast of Columbus.
The bucolic woodland setting seems far from the devastating opioid epidemic in Keller’s home state of West Virginia, but the crisis consumes her — so much so that she has made it the central issue in her “Bell Elkins” crime novels.
The seventh book in the series, “Bone on Bone,” was published Aug. 21. It, too, features protagonist Bell Elkins, a West Virginia native and former prosecuting attorney crusading against the drug problem.
Whenever Keller sees or hears West Virginia or her hometown of Huntington described as the “opioid capital,” she said, “it really hurts.”
“My feelings about West Virginia are not just nostalgic,” she said. “It’s a place filled with good, hardworking people, and the opioid crisis is really a tragedy.”
From the first book in the series, “A Killing in the Hills” (2012), Keller has centered her plots on crimes that in some way are aggravated by drug abuse.
In the first novel, three elderly men who meet weekly for coffee and conversation at a local restaurant are gunned down, confounding authorities and setting Bell and the sheriff off to solve the complicated and dangerous case.
In writing the series, Keller has called upon skills she honed during her years as a newspaper journalist. From 1981 to 1998, she worked as a general-assignment reporter and then a feature writer for The Dispatch; from 1998 to 2012, she was a cultural writer and columnist for the Chicago Tribune. At the Tribune, she won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her series about the aftermath of a deadly tornado in a small Illinois town.
Journalist James Warren, the managing editor for features at the Tribune who assigned Keller the series and now works as a freelancer, said he isn’t surprised that she turned to novel writing.
“It’s a perfect vehicle for her vivid imagination, precise reporting and understanding of how to construct and pace a story,” Warren said.
At various times, Keller has taught journalism, including stints at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago and Ohio University.
When she turned to fiction writing, “A Killing in the Hills” wasn’t her first attempt. While shopping another novel (not a mystery), Keller was turned down by an editor who was looking for a series with a strong female lead.
“She said, ‘Do you have anything like that?’” Keller recalled, “and I said, ‘Why, I have the very thing’ — and I started writing it that night.”
She based the setting for her series — the fictional Ackers Gap — on Guyandotte, West Virginia, which is “just up the road” from Huntington, she said. She sometimes wanders through cemeteries to search for potential names for her characters. Other times, she names them for great writers or colleagues from her newspaper days.
Keller — the second of three children of a college mathematics professor (her father) and a high-school English teacher (her mother) — knew by the second grade, she said, that she was a writer.
“My dad would bring home computer paper, and I was writing comic books and novels,” she said. “There was this burning thing inside me. I knew I could tell stories better than anyone.”
She graduated in 1976 from Marshall University in Huntington, then served as a reporting intern for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson in Washington, D.C.
She landed her first newspaper job at the Ashland (Kentucky) Daily Independent, followed by graduate school at Marshall, from which she earned a master’s degree in English. In 1981, she talked her way into a general-assignment reporter’s job at The Dispatch, working the 4 p.m.to-midnight shift while also earning a doctorate in English literature from Ohio State University.
Carolyn Focht, an assistant city editor at The Dispatch at the time, said Keller “always got the goods.”
“You’d send her out on a story, and she came back with it,” Focht said. “I’m not at all surprised that she’s writing books. And she always liked the police stuff. She can do any kind of writing she wants. She’s that good.”
Keller, who is in her 60s, attributes her success in fiction writing to her work in journalism.
As a newspaper reporter, she said, “you have to smarten up and toughen up . ... The subject matter is incredible, and you learn to write and write fast.”
For the Bell Elkins series, Keller researched the opioid crisis through periodicals and documentaries, including the Netflix series “Recovery Boys” and “Heroin(e).” She also has a friend who is an addict.
“I’m eternally curious about the choices people make in their lives,” she said. “Why do people turn to such self-destructive ways? We can say it’s all chemical and out of our control, but there is a point of choice. There’s a crossroads, and that’s where literature is.”
Keller thinks fiction defines and illuminates social issues in ways often superior to nonfiction, she said.
“I’ve always felt that fiction is a higher form. There is great nonfiction writing on the opioid crisis, but now it’s become a spiritual problem. When it makes that leap, it becomes the realm of fiction.
“We have great social treatises on World War I, but I never understood that war until I read ‘A Long Long Way’ (by Sebastian Barry) and ‘Birdsong’ (by Sebastian Faulk). And the best way to understand the Depression is to read ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’”