An Esteemed Poet of Southern Crime

I am sorry to hear that Edgar and Emmy award-winning novelist and TV soap-opera writer Michael Malone, who penned three well-reviewed mysteries set in a fictional North Carolina town, passed away on August 19 from pancreatic cancer. He was 80 years old.

A recent obituary in the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer recalls that Malone was born in Durham in 1942, “the oldest of six children.” He went on to study English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then procured a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. In 1975 he published Painting the Roses Red, the first of his more than a dozen novels. After living for years with his wife, Renaissance scholar Maureen Quilligan, in such diverse places as London, New York City, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, in 2000 the couple resettled in Hillsborough, N.C. which greatly resembled the pocket-edition community that backgrounded his “Cuddy and Justin” novels. Here’s what I wrote of those books, following a very entertaining interview I conducted with Malone back in 2002:

While his standalone novels and single collection of short stories (Red Clay, Blue Cadillac, released in mid-2002) have found enthusiastic audiences among readers who enjoy conscientiously plotted but often humorous works replete with eccentric characters, it may be Malone's mysteries that have won him the most consistent following. All three are set in fictional, class-stratified Hillston, North Carolina, a small Piedmont burg of familiar rhythms and history, prejudices and crimes. And they all feature the odd-couple pairing of Lieutenant Justin Bartholomew Savile V (black-sheep scion of the town's founding family and head of the Hillston Police Department's homicide division) with HPD chief Cudberth "Cuddy" Mangum (a Vietnam vet and prodigious consumer of junk food, who feigns ignorance behind country-boy witticisms).

The first installment of this series, Uncivil Seasons (1983), has the two officers investigating a brutal slaying that serves as the pretext for a more thorough delving into the deceits on which Hillston's past and privileged depend. Time's Witness (1989) builds from the pending execution of George Hall, a black man Mangum had arrested seven years before for killing a white policeman, while First Lady [2001] ... finds Justin and Cuddy pursuing a serial killer, who is targeting local women—among them, it's thought, chart-topping Irish singer Mavis Mahar, who's in Hillston to give a concert. In these novels, Malone's Southern sense of place is compelling and poetic, not forced (no frequent mentions of magnolia trees and mint juleps), and his dialogue rumbles with sarcasm and wisecracks.

According to a second obituary, this one submitted by his family, Malone “was working on a fourth book in his ‘Cuddy and Justin’ series when he fell ill with cancer.”

In addition to his literary endeavors, the theater-loving Michael Malone served as head writer on the ABC-TV soap opera One Life to Live from 1991 to 1996 (for which he won a Daytime Emmy in 1994), before moving over to NBC-TV’s Another World in 1997. He returned to OLTL in 2003, and spent another year or so with that show. His obit shares these further facts about his life: “Malone loved cooking, musicals, jazz, dancing and justice for all unfairly incarcerated. In his creative works, he spoke out against the death penalty, raised awareness about the AIDS crisis and Lupus, and was an early advocate for LGBTQ rights. His novels set in the South continuously reminded readers of the dangers of white supremacy. A donor to the Southern Poverty Law Center for over 40 years, Michael’s family asks that any donations in his name be made to this increasingly crucial institution.”

The author’s funeral, says the News & Observer, “is scheduled for 11 a.m. Monday, Aug. 29, at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church on St. Mary’s Road in Hillsborough. Malone will be buried in the church’s cemetery.”