Here’s a line from a recently published book:
“Toads trilled in the mill ponds strung out along Spring Creek, the stream that gushed forth from the Big Spring, around which the town of Adamant had grown.”
If that sounds like Bellefonte until you get to the name of the community, it’s because in the world of Charles Fergus’ latest novel, Adamant is Bellefonte, thinly disguised, just as Colerain County is the fictionalized name for Centre County.
Other place names in “Lay This Body Down” have not been changed: The Barrens, Halfmoon Valley Road, Tussey Mountain, the Seven Mountains. There’s no State College nor even a fictionalized version of State College in the novel because it’s set in 1837, 18 years before the founding of the school we now call Penn State and the development around the school of a village that would eventually become the college town we know and love.
The story begins with a fiery anti-slavery speech in a local church. It does not go well. Though Pennsylvania is a free state, many citizens of Adamant are adamantly pro-slavery: They pelt the speaker with corncobs, apples, rocks and eggs. The sheriff, 24-year-old Gideon Stoltz, steps in to keep the peace.
But Colerain County in the years leading up to the Civil War is not a peaceful place. In rapid succession, Sheriff Stoltz learns of two Virginians hunting a fugitive slave, the kidnapping of free Blacks who will be sold into bondage if they’re not rescued, and the murder of an abolitionist newspaper editor.
What follows is more or less a police procedural, 1837-style, revolving around conflict between those who regard Black people as property and those who view Black people as persons — including the persons themselves. The good guys, you’ll be pleased to know, are decidedly anti-slavery.
“Lay This Body Down” is Fergus’s third Gideon Stoltz mystery and 20th book overall. The earlier installments of the series are “A Stranger Here Below” (2019) and “Nighthawk’s Wing” (2021). A fourth novel is in the works.
The series is a departure for the author, whose earlier output largely consisted of guides to plants and wildlife with titles like “Common Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms of the Northeast” and “Swamp Screamer: At Large with the Florida Panther.”
A State College native and Penn State graduate now living in Vermont, Fergus is coming home next week to read from the new work: at the Centre County Historical Society at 7 p.m. on Tuesday and at the Bellefonte Art Museum at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
If you attend either event, don’t be surprised if the speaker breaks into song. Among his other talents, Fergus performs with an a cappella American roots trio called Yestermorn.
During a Zoom chat the other day, I asked him why, in the Gideon Stoltz books, he changes some local place names and not others. It’s a way, he explains, of putting a bit of distance between fact and fiction. “Lay This Body Down” isn’t a true story, but like any work of fiction, it offers “a window on the truth.”
Fergus draws on his own experience in developing his hero’s back story, which includes the traumatic impact of Stoltz’s mother’s murder. Longtime Centre Countians will recall the murder of Ruth Fergus in her College Heights home in 1995.
“When I decided to write a mystery series,” Fergus says on his website, “I wanted to depict, as honestly as I could, the reality of what happens when a person takes another person’s life.”
Fergus wrote powerfully and painfully about his mother’s death in an essay published in the Yale Review in 1999.
His dismay was shared by the many who came to Ruth’s funeral: “Perhaps the mourners sensed, as I had, that State College was no longer a small town. It had crossed some vague boundary and become a less humane, a more dangerous place: it was a city now.”
Fergus’ Colerain County in the 1830s was also a dangerous place, especially if you were Black, gay or a sheriff trying to protect the innocent and the oppressed.
I ask Fergus why he is drawn to that long-ago time, a period he calls the Jacksonian Era, after President Andrew Jackson. Part of his answer is that many of the issues the young nation was grappling with would be “hauntingly familiar” to readers today, including gun violence, states’ rights and of course, racism.
As for how one gets the details right – what folks ate, what they wore, how they spoke, how they treated maladies, etc. – Fergus has a simple and obvious answer: research, research, research. Particularly useful was John Blair Linn’s “History of Centre and Clinton Counties.”
All the rest is developing a plot that makes readers want to know what happens next, and creating characters they can relate to. He succeeds at both.
“People are still people,” Fergus says of his 19th century characters. “They’re not a different species.”
