THE WIDOWS: A Visit to a 1920s Appalachia Mystery with Jess Montgomery

LUCY BURDETTE: We're so excited to be hosting Jess Montgomery and her brand new release, THE WIDOWS. You might know Jess as Sharon Short, who's written a wonderful novel MY ONE SQUARE INCH OF ALASKA, along with several mystery series and many essays and humor columns. But this month she's here to talk about her new historical mystery, written as Jess Montgomery. Welcome Jess!

JESS MONTGOMERY: I’m a child of Appalachia—both sides of my family of origin go back generation after generation after generation deep in the hills and hollers (as we pronounced ‘hollows’) in Eastern Kentucky. However, I grew up in a region of Ohio that’s geographically outside the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio—a first-generation “Buckeye,” as I was often teased as a child.

Yet, the dynamics of growing up in an Appalachian family shaped me far more than actual location of birth. I grew up steeped in Appalachian lore, dialect, food, attitudes, customs, crafts, music. When I was in high school, I wrote a musical, “Just an Old Ballad,” inspired by the Appalachian ballads I’d grown up learning—ballads that often centered around heartache and sorrow and, yes, murder. “Pearl Bryant,” a variation of the ballad more commonly known as “Pearl Bryan” was one of the songs my Mamaw taught me. The opening verse as I learned it from my Mamaw:

Down, down in yonder valley

Where flowers fade and bloom

Lies our own Pearl Bryant

A-mouldering in her tomb…

Probably not the lyrics an eight-year-old girl ought to learn from her grandmother, but though I couldn’t have described it this way as a young kid, I was enchanted by the ballad’s intrigue, the striking imagery and lovely though dramatic words, the haunting melody and mournful rhythms.

I loved singing it while helping Mamaw wind skeins of thread or yarn for her crocheting projects. Such songs—along with quilts, and soup beans and corn pone for supper, and observing aunts and uncles barter tomatoes and canned goods back and forth at the end of each summer, and trips ‘back home’ (as my parents called it even decades after moving north for factory work) to the land where my family members were tobacco and subsistence farmers—formed the backdrop of my childhood.

So perhaps, knowing I wanted to be a writer, and being fairly proficient as a pianist and guitarist, it’s not all that amazing that I wrote a musical play inspired by this backdrop and the ballads I’d learned: “Just an Old Ballad.”

What was amazing is that my school’s drama teacher allowed me to produce and direct it. Even more amazing—I cast in the lead male role a young man who I’d later date and marry. Thirty-plus years later, we’re still happily married—a pretty great outcome for a self-penned and produced high school musical!

But in the middle-class, suburban high school I attended, the audience of my peers was a bit less than, well, receptive. It wasn’t just that the tunes I wrote were pretty amateurish. (I was 17, after all.) I think the dialect and subject matter and characters were odd and jarring to them.

As years went by, I never wrote directly about Appalachian characters. Looking back, I was probably somewhat burned by the reception of my murder-mystery/love-story musical. I’ve always felt a bit at odds with where I fit—not geographically born into Appalachia, and yet formed by the region more deeply than where I actually was born and grew up.

Then, a few years ago, we were planning our first trip to visit our younger daughter for her birthday weekend at Ohio University, in Athens County, Ohio—the Appalachian foothills. I ran across a tourism website for Vinton County (just southwest of Athens County), which featured Maude Collins, Ohio’s true first female sheriff in 1925 after her husband was killed in the line of duty while writing a speeding ticket. Maude worked as her husband’s jail matron in the small jail attached to the county-owned sheriff’s house, where they lived with their five children. The story goes that Maude was packing up to go back to her parents in West Virginia when the county commissioners came by and asked, “Where you goin’, Maude,” and then further inquired as to whether she’d fill out her husband’s term. She would and did, and in 1926, was elected in her own right as sheriff—in a landslide.

My imagination immediately went to work: what if great mystery surrounded the murder of the sheriff? What if he was allegedly killed by a prisoner he was transporting—and that prisoner supposedly ran off? What if his widow didn’t accept that easy explanation, but did accept the role of sheriff—just so she could investigate his murder?

And so, Lily Ross came into being. Along with an unlikely ally—Marvena Whitcomb, herself a widow after her common law husband dies in a coal mining cave in, a union organizer, and a childhood friend of Lily’s husband—Lily sets to investigating the murder. Their sleuthing plays out against a backdrop of women’s rights, worker’s rights, union miners sparring with management, coal mining, and prohibition.

But the setting—1920s Appalachia—is as much a character in the story as Lily and Marvena.

So at last, I could come full circle and embrace my Appalachian roots in my writing—lore, dialect, food, attitudes, customs, crafts, music. More importantly, as I shaped the strong female cast of THE WIDOWS, I particularly drew on the paternal side of my family of origin—my grandmother, aunts, great aunts, and a cousin—and memories of their quiet strength, their traditions. I thought about travelling with my parents down winding roads, deep in the night, to finally come to my grandma’s tiny house, set on a sloped lawn that bloomed with purple phlox in the spring. In any season, she always had some treat waiting for me—a slice of pie, or of her delicious dried-apple stack cake, or sorghum cookies, and a big glass of fresh cold milk. I didn’t live with her, but somehow, each visit with her deep in the heart of Appalachia felt like coming home.

Though THE WIDOWS is fully a story of my imagination, its threads include not just the inspiration of Maude, but the inspiration of these deep roots. Writing it, in many ways, feels like finally coming home.


For Jess, that dried-apple stack cake evoked a sense of "home." What food, person, or activity most evokes home for you?

About the Book: Set in the coal-mining town of Kinship, Ohio in 1925, The Widows is about two women from different worlds, whose lives collide when the man they both love is found murdered. When Lily Ross learns that her husband, Daniel Ross, Kinship’s widely respected sheriff, has been killed while transporting a prisoner, she is devastated and vows to avenge his death.  Hours after his funeral, a stranger appears at her door.  Marvena Whitcomb, a hardscrabble coal miner’s widow, is unaware that Daniel has been killed, and begs to speak with him about her missing daughter. In the course of their encounter, these two women—who live only miles apart but come from entirely different worlds—realize that Daniel was not the man they believed him to be—and that his murder is far more complex than either of them could have imagined. In order to uncover the truth, Lily and Marvena must work together and eventually learn to trust one another if they are going to find Daniel’s killer—and save their community.  While The Widows is a work of fiction, the plot was inspired by the true stories of two women: Maude Collins, the first female sheriff in the state of Ohio, whose husband died in the line of duty under mysterious circumstances in 1925, and by Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, the prominent labor and community organizer. The Widows explores the dangers of coal mining, the history of unionization, and the struggle for women’s rights.

THE WIDOWS (writing as Jess Montgomery), published by Minotaur Books, January 8, 2019
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