Ralph Ellis now not has lengthy hair and a love for smoking pot like his protagonist in “The Accident Report” (Photograph by Jim Harrison)
Newspaper reporters had been as soon as highly effective sufficient to topple a authorities utilizing solely their typewriters. Watergate despatched numerous scruffy idealists to J-school to emulate Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Atlanta newsman Ralph Ellis was one in all them, and, for his fiction debut, he attracts upon his halcyon reminiscences in The Accident Report, a cagey, comedian novel a couple of small-time journalist with delusions of grandeur.
Clearly educated to not bury the lead, Ellis opens his story with sure scene-setting cultural signifiers: “On the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Ronald Truluck drove the lengthy solution to work so he might smoke a celebratory joint. … The wind whipped his shoulder-length hair. He clicked on the AM radio. The guitar solo on the Allman Brothers’ ‘Ramblin’ Man’ rang out of the little audio system.” Welcome again to 1974.
Truluck is a scrappy however feckless police reporter at The Eagle, which genially covers Millerton, North Carolina, a somnolent textile city, with a entrance web page stuffed with “pet-of-the-week” pictures and new backyard membership officers. Bored together with his beat and antsy for a scoop, Truluck lastly will get a tip: Metropolis Council member Lamont Moody drunkenly crashed his Bonneville into somebody’s fowl bathtub, and the police let him stroll away. No person a lot cares, besides Truluck. Smelling a coverup, he launches a breathless investigation of “Lamontgate” with a forged of eccentric characters acquainted to anybody who has ever tried (and failed) to gin up pleasure in a small city.
“I loved this novel of a younger reporter at his first newspaper job displaying each his self-importance and his insecurities,” mentioned Charlene Ball, who wrote Darkish Girl: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer. “Ronald [Truluck] is so plausible, irritating and sympathetic as he struggles to make his mark as an investigative reporter. [His] bumbling but dogged dedication to interrupt a narrative of scandal in Metropolis Corridor brings outcomes, if not those he hopes for. It’s all laugh-out-loud humorous.”
Creator and reader Ron Aiken put it extra bluntly: “The novel’s strengths are the whiplash dialogue and Ronald Truluck. I needed to hug him and provides him a swift kick within the ass on the similar time.”
The stakes of our hero’s quest might sound penny-ante, however suspense runs excessive with well-timed, surprising twists within the story line and a triumphal decision. “Ralph proves himself as a novelist in some ways, particularly how he cleverly makes use of satire,” mentioned Editor Janie Mills. “Readers are captivated by his story and his suave mixing of the characters and narrative. Then, he surprises them with one thing they couldn’t have anticipated.”
Undergirding all of the humor is a veteran’s grasp class on the right way to chase down a narrative — the paper path, tight-lipped sources and pink herrings. Reporters will enjoyment of all of those particulars, which ring true, however you needn’t have typed an obit to get pleasure from The Accident Report. Because of Ellis’ deft storytelling, it performs out like a comfortable thriller instructed in tones of hard-boiled noir with greater than a touch of autobiography. Its authenticity, Ellis mentioned, derives from lived expertise.
“I had lengthy hair and smoked a number of pot — then,” Ellis, 72, mentioned of his early years on the job. “I’m now not a dedicated pothead. And the cluelessness! I used to be much more clueless than Ronald again then.”
Ellis grew up in Waynesville, North Carolina. He launched his journalism profession within the late Nineteen Sixties at an underground newspaper created to protest his highschool’s repressive costume code. (His major argument, that Jesus had lengthy hair, didn’t sway the conservative faculty board.) He attended the College of North Carolina after which went to work at The Occasions in Thomasville.
No stranger to scoops, he has toiled at newspapers all around the South: Conway, Myrtle Seashore and Charleston, South Carolina; Alexandria, Virginia; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, culminating in his dealing with of nationwide and worldwide tales at The Atlanta Journal-Structure and CNN. His work additionally has appeared in The New York Occasions. He’s married to meals author and editor Susan Puckett, so there’s no scarcity of store discuss of their Decatur parlor.
“Prior to now, newsrooms tended to look alike, with wooden paneling, beige carpet and a number of cigarette smoke hanging within the air, and the newsroom was at all times broad open, the place anybody might simply stroll in,” he recalled.
Not glamorous however however stuffed with shabby romance for individuals who had been there, The Accident Report is a loving tribute to old-school, shoe-leather reporting and establishes Ellis as a first-rate satirist. His ink-stained themes really feel bittersweet at this time, although, with out the reassuring background noise of a roaring press. As of final 12 months, solely a 3rd of the greater than 1,000 every day newspapers nonetheless print seven days per week, leaving many people to languish in “information deserts.” Increasingly, protection of present occasions — even pets of the week — is atomized into blogs, Substacks and social media, all of it salubriously smoke-free. Is there nonetheless a spot for a hungry, hard-nosed journalist?
Aiken noticed, “Era Z would possibly dominate at this time’s cultural highlight, however Ralph Ellis’ Ronald Truluck reminds us that the struggles of younger males — id, goal and belonging — are timeless.”
It’s a superb factor. Ellis is planning a sequence to observe Truluck’s misadventures. Possibly there’s a Pulitzer in his future but, if he ever cuts his hair.
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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines resembling Atlanta, Backyard & Gun, Males’s Journal and Nation Residing. She is the creator of Avenue Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Trigger: Music from Macon.
