Queen of Memphis Summary:
LuAnn Collier, a small-town beauty queen from the Delta, has eloped with Burniss Winnforth, the most sought-after bachelor in Memphis, and her new mother-in-law Maggie is furious. The Winnforths are the leaders of Memphis society, and the Colliers are what Maggie considers “common,” a bunch of low-class gamblers or worse, so she’s not about to sit back and let this flashy gold-digger into the family, not without a fight. And Maggie’s campaign of gossip and ostracism to run LuAnn off is particularly vicious because she’s driven by a force more powerful than mere snobbery. Maggie’s scared to death that LuAnn will uncover a long-buried Winnforth family secret, one so shocking that it could knock the family from the pinnacle of Memphis society. But running LuAnn off is a lot harder than Maggie ever imagined.
Interview
Donna Meredith: What ties do you have to Memphis?
Martin Hegwood
Martin Hegwood: I have had a number of ties to Memphis my entire life.
My grandmother, who lived next door to us in Pascagoula when I was a kid, had two brothers who lived in Memphis and a sister who lived across the river in Jonesboro. We took long road trips every summer to visit them – sleeping on couches and such — and my cousins would show me all the big city attractions. Pascagoula had a population of maybe 14,000, so Memphis was immense, too big for me to grasp, but I did get a sense of the city’s personality. Memphis is a brash, dynamic city where everything seems to be written on a grand scale. I can still remember my amazement my uncle showed me the Pink Palace and told me that it had been built to be somebody’s home. We had some pretty nice houses on the beach in Pascagoula, but nothing even close to that.
Then a few years later I went to college at Ole Miss. Ole Miss is definitely in the Memphis orbit, and my friends and I went up there a couple of times every month.
DM: What details were most challenging to get right about the setting?
MH: One of the main storylines revolves around Hard Way Harry Collier’s speakeasy/casino in West Memphis. Harry was a World War One vet, and he set up his operations during the Roaring Twenties. Harry would have been born in the 1890s. Further, his son Nate was a World War Two vet, who would have been born in the 1920s. It follows that LuAnn, Harry’s granddaughter and Nate’s daughter, would have been born in the late 1940s. But that would make LuAnn more than 70 years old today, closer to 80. That didn’t work, so instead of setting the story in the present day, I had to move everything back 25 years to the period from 1999 to about 2005 or2006. I had to draw up a detailed timeline and check every scene to make sure it remained true to the period in which it occurred. Got tricky at times.
Donna Meredith
DM: Queen of Memphis focuses so strongly on the importance of social class in the South. How did you become interested in that theme?
MH: I can’t speak to class distinctions in other parts of the world or even other parts of the United States. They exist everywhere, always have, always will. But it has been my observation that in the South—at least in the small-town South—a person can move up in class. It happens all the time. (Of course, they can also move down.) It usually happens over the course of several generations, but it can be done. It’s sometimes a painful process, but the possibility is there. In the Mississippi Delta, there are quite a few families with wealth and social prominence who landed there as penniless immigrants only a century ago. It’s never easy—there are always a lot of setbacks—but it’s real-life drama that plays out before our eyes, and it’s great material for any novelist.
DM: How long did you work on this book?
MH: Queen of Memphis evolved over the course of ten to fifteen years. It took a while to take shape. Most of that time it was a partial manuscript sitting unfinished on a shelf. I would swear off writing from time to time and the writing bug would go into remission, but then something would trigger a flare-up, and I’d get back to it. I have written well over 200,000 words on this story, most of which I just had to get down on paper, and most of which are probably in some forgotten corner of a closet. The book in its final form comprises about 90,000 words. I hope I’ve gotten it all out. I can’t say that it’s a story that needs to be told; that’s a judgement for other people to make. But it is a story that I needed to tell.
DM: Are any characters based on people you know?
MH: No character is entirely based on someone I know, but almost every character has some particular characteristic (or two) of someone I have known. Yes, I have known political animals like Cass Peeler, but Cass’s characteristics and ambitions are common to many politicians. Same with Ike Seater. I had a good friend who was a lanky, tough-as-leather Type A who chased women and drank whiskey and didn’t give two hoots about what the elites thought of him. Yet, like Ike, when he gave you his word on something, he was unshakable. True integrity. And yes, I knew someone who was as comfortable in his own skin as Manny Montgomery, who asked for nothing and refused to be intimidated because of skin color, yet never once displayed – to me at least – any hint of a chip on his shoulder. That’s a few of the book’s characters who share at least some characteristics with persons I have known.
DM: Did any particular character really speak to you?
MH: That’s an easy call. When the book started out, the main character was to be Wesley, a thirty-something year old man who had the connections to land a lobbying job in Washington. The whole story – whatever it was going to be — was to take place in D.C. Washington is a “target rich” environment, so I figured I could easily come up with a plot, maybe even a series. I started writing out a family tree for Wesley and roughing out short biographies. Routine background info that might never see the light of day. And everything was rocking along fine, but then I came to Wesley’s mother LuAnn.
LuAnn began as a 50-something high society type (whose name at the time was Julia) whose life centered around the country club, a few high dollar charity functions, and lots of world-wide travel to the usual spots (Nice, Monaco, Palm Beach, etc.) often with the same crowd. Stereotypical high society female. Trouble was, every character in Wesley’s family was being cut from the same cloth; I needed some variety. All the Winnforths were uniformly reserved, aristocratic, and boring. So I decided to make Julia some kind of entertainer. And it occurred to me that pageants such as Miss America, etc. have talent competitions, and a beauty pageant winner thrown in amongst the Winnforths might really spice things up.
I then began thinking how the family would react—and it was not good—and that added some much-needed conflict. And I decided to turn up the heat on this conflict, so the character LuAnn began to take shape. I made her a complete outsider, the antithesis of what a staid, stuffy bunch of bluebloods would want in the family. So I began concentrating on this character. Where did she come from? Who were her people? How could I make her background as different from the Memphis aristocracy as possible? And pretty soon, I was intrigued not only with LuAnn but with her whole family. I even chose a new name for this character, one that sounds like small-town Southern. Julia became LuAnn.
Now remember, all this started as an attempt to add just a little color to Wesley’s background. His mother Julia was never meant to be a major player in the story, she was to be strictly a background character. At this point, the story was going to take place in Washington. There was no Ike Seater, no Lottie Boo Lister, no Estelle Collier, no Manny Montgomery—there was not even such a place as Wigley’s Landing nor was there a 1920s West Memphis speakeasy called the El Dorado. But once I got started, there was no stopping, and pretty soon LuAnn just took over the story. She elbowed Wesley out of the way, took over the story, and took it in a completely new direction. And the focus shifted from Washington, D.C., to Memphis (thank God).
So, yes, there was a character that really spoke to me, and it was LuAnn Collier.
DM: Tell us a little about your background.
MH: My background is small town Mississippi. I grew up in Pascagoula as did my father. My mother was from Hattiesburg and Columbia. I married a girl from Lexington. I now split my time between Pascagoula and Canton, a little town 20 miles north of Jackson. So all my life has revolved around small towns in Mississippi. Small towns are a great venue for studying people; you interact with all the different types and classes of people on a daily basis. Faulkner, Harper Lee, Tennessee Williams, James Street, William Alexander Percy, Willie Morris, and a lot of other writers came from small Mississippi towns. That’s no coincidence.
DM: What got you started as a writer?
MH: As I left school, married, and entered into the world of work, I realized something was missing. I wasn’t getting much satisfaction from the jobs I had, even the good ones. And at one particularly low ebb, I admitted to myself that deep down what I wanted to do was write. I also admitted that the only thing holding me back was a fear of failure.
I made a deal with myself. I would take a couple of years and make myself into a writer. I would read books on how to write; I would study the writers I admired, I would go to seminars, whatever it took. I resolved to do something every day to learn how to write. Not only that, I would actually write something every day. May not be but one sentence, but I was going to do it every day.
The first couple of weeks were pure hell. I had decided my best shot at fiction would be mysteries, and that’s what I’d do. And with no experience (and no confidence) at formulating plots, I began writing the biography of my private detective protagonist. Pretty soon, this guy started to take shape, and instead of dreading my daily writing sessions, I began to look forward to them. Didn’t know exactly what this guy was going to do, but I sure was getting to know him. Eventually, things began to gel, and three years later I sold a novel to St. Martin’s Press.
DM: What writers or works have influenced your writing?
MH: I greatly admire William Faulkner because I like the way his sentences sound. It’s lyrical. He’s also a close observer of human nature. I guess a big part of Faulkner’s attraction for me is that many of his stories revolve around small-town Mississippi characters and settings. He also has respect for his reader’s intelligence; he doesn’t spoon feed his stories. I like that.
I am drawn to what I’ve heard described as muscular prose, so I’m a big fan of James Lee Burke. For my money, he’s our best living writer. Mesmerizing prose and plenty of action. His characters are flawed to say the least, but that’s what makes them come alive.
DM: What are you working on next?
MH: I am conducting research for a limited biography of William Faulkner. By “limited” I mean it covers only a brief period of his life, the years before his marriage to Estelle when he spent a lot of time in New Orleans and my hometown of Pascagoula where he “courted” Helen Baird. It’s the time when he transitioned from poetry to prose. It’s strictly a biography; I make no attempt to analyze his writing.
DM: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Martin. SLR wishes you every success with your book on Faulkner and other writing projects.
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