Maris Lawyer didn’t grow up learning about the Coal Wars. She didn’t know about the private detectives roaming the mountains, or the train robberies, the violent clashes with bootleggers, the union busters and the bloodshed.
She had never heard the name “Baldwin-Felts.”
“I grew up in this area … and I had never heard anything about them,” Lawyer says. “And this was just 100 years ago, not that far away in history in my mind.”
The story of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency — infamous for its violent repression of labor union members from the early 1890s to 1937 — takes center stage in Lawyer’s new novel “The Blue Line Down,” out now from Hub City Press.
The winner of the 2020 South Carolina Novel Prize, “The Blue Line Down” tells the story of Jude Washer, a runaway from the coal mines in Virginia who joins the detective agency in the early 1920s as it plans a raid against a mining town. But after a series of bloody clashes, Jude is cast out on a journey through the mountains of South Carolina, where he searches for redemption among the bootleggers and gangs who live in the hills.
“It’s a story about a young man who doesn’t make the right decision when it’s most needed from him, and who tries to find redemption in all the wrong places,” Lawyer says.
With “The Blue Line Down,” Lawyer fills a gap in history by highlighting a time and place that has been overlooked. What began in 2017 as a college project during her senior year at Anderson University developed over the course of multiple drafts into a sweeping story about the search for morality and the consequences wrought by seeking justice in a world where justice is so often illusory.
The novel has already received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, the latter of which praised Lawyer’s “rugged writing with a moral compass” and her “stripped-down language and propulsive storytelling.”
At just 26 years old, Lawyer says she never anticipated the novel would win the award from Hub City Press. She happened to have been on the phone with her husband when she received an email telling her she’d been selected as a finalist.
“I saw the email alert from Hub City, and I was talking with him on the phone, and I said, ‘Hey, that’s really nice that they alert you when you get a rejection,’” Lawyer says. “When I opened it and saw I’d been selected, I really got dizzy. I was so floored. I just really didn’t think I would get published until I was in my 40s.”
