Nashville – America’s self-proclaimed “Music City” – capital of Tennessee with about 700,000 people (though it’s one of the US’s fastest growing cities right now). Nashville’s got it all in the crime writing stakes – serial killers, nosy Private Eyes, noirs, cosies and, I’ll warn you now, rather a lot of murdered country music stars!!
So let’s dive straight in with LT Ellison’s homicide Lieutenant Taylor Jackson ten-book series set in Nashville, Tennessee. Start with All the Pretty Girls (2007) which introduces Taylor Jackson and her lover, FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin. The “Southern Strangler” is slaughtering his way through the Southeast United States, leaving a gruesome memento at each crime scene. TV reporter Whitney Connolly reckons the killer is a Nashville native.
Now Nashville may not be the safest city in the world, but this is crime fiction (remember poor old Oxford has a fictional body count way above the actual crime stats for the university town!!) and in LT Ellison’s Nashville killers abound – serial killers no less: the Snow White Killer, The Conductor, The Pretender, to name a few mass murderers terrorising the good folk of Nashville. There’s also very contemporary crime – book three, Judas Kiss (2009), sees outrage at a Nashville pregnant mum murdered until it comes out she was involved in an amateur porn website. In The Cold Room (2010) Jackson works with detective James “Memphis” Highsmythe from New Scotland Yard while mysticism and witchcraft pop up in The Immortals (2010). There’s a couple of side trips for Jackson – the Scottish Highlands in Where all the Dead Lie for instance – but the series is solidly Nashville focused.
Ellison also writes the Samantha Owen spin-off series featuring a medical examiner and forensic pathologist who works in Tennessee and often encounters Taylor Jackon as a secondary character. It’s a four-book series. The first book in the series, A Deeper Darkness (2012), takes in everything from the fallout from Tennessee floods to returning soldiers from Afghanistan. Later books in the series see Samantha move away to a teaching job at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
Steven Womack is as prolific as LT Ellison with his nine books in the Harry James Denton Series – “Music City Murders” – of course set in Nashville. He’s been cranking them out since the early 1990s right up to today. The debut series, Dead Folks’ Blues (1992), won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and introduces journalist Harry James Denton – recently got divorced…and just fired. Right in the classic noir Private Eye tradition, dose of sardonic 90’s humour, as Denton prowls the streets of Nashville. Torch Town Boogie (1993) gives us the Nashville Arsonist (LT Ellison’s not the only Nashville writer with a plethora of named repeat offenders) while Way Past Dead (1995) gives us what we always expected to appear in a Nashville crime novel – dead country music stars. Denton’s Nashville can get super sleazy, druggy and gang-affiliated but he also has a dig at folksy Tennessee authors in A Manual of Murder (2018). Womack also writes the Jack Lynch series featuring a cynical, disillusioned newspaperman in New Orleans.
Peggy O’Neal Peden writes a Nashville-set mystery series, though perhaps a little cosier than Ellison’s serial killers or Womack’s PI noirs. In the first book in the trilogy, Your Killin’ Heart (2017), shatters a local myth – ‘Contrary to popular belief, not everyone in Nashville is an aspiring country music star.’ But getting away from country music wanna-bes in Nashville is (apparently) tricky. Campbell Hall just wants to run her travel agency but finds herself investigating murders of country music’s most beloved stars. In Gone Missin’ (2021) Campbell has to try and track a missing Nashville buddy who’s disappeared down in Mexico, and finally in Flyin’ Solo (2022 – O’ Neal Peden sure does like an apostrophe to replace a letter in her titles!) there’s murderous intent at Campbell’s twentieth-year high school reunion.
If you want to get real cosy in Nashville then you need former tax advisor (and who could possibly know more about criminals!) Diane Kelly. As well as getting your taxes done on time Kelly really likes pets. Hence her “house-flipper” series of seven cat mysteries featuring Sawdust, a cat owned by Whitney Whitaker, a hopeless romantic when it comes to real estate. In book one, Dead as a Door Knocker, (2019) a dead body turns up in a well-manicured flower bed meaning it’s up to Whitney, Nashville Police Detective Collin Flynn, and of course Sawdust, to solve the mystery. Whitney and Sawdust do move around Nashville though – downtown Nashville, Germantown, the Music City Motor Court, the Cumberland River. Lane is super prolific and as well as the house-flipper series she’s also the author of the Death and Taxes series (she just can’t leave those IRS forms alone!), the Paw Enforcement series (featuring a police K-9 in Fort Worth, Texas), The Busted series (about a rather endowed, shall we say, Mobile, Alabama, police department motorcycle cop), the Southern Homebrew series set in Chattanooga, Tennessee, featuring a rather unlikely crime fighter, moonshiner Hattie Hayes, and the wintery Mountain Lodge series set in North Carolina. Somewhere out there Diane Kelly is right now writing another series!
A few more Nashville-set mysteries:
- Phyllis Gobbell’s Notorious in Nashville (2023), one of the Jordan Mayfair detective series, where a crooked developer plans to demolish a historic building and build yet another sleek, new tower. There are also some troubled country music stars (wouldn’t you know it!) and some dead bodies.
- William Baer’s Murder in Nashville (2024) is also about trouble in country music land and features Knoxville and Galveston as well as Nashville. Supermodel and amateur sleuth Deirdre (yes, you read that right – ‘supermodel and amateur sleuth’) works with the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department to get to theb bottom of a country music star’s abduction.
- Let’s squeeze in one local true crime – Martha Smith Tate’s The Last Ride: Murder, Money, and the Sensational Trial that Captivated Nashville (2022), about the murder of prominent Nashville citizen W. Haynie Gourley on May 24, 1968. The killing took place among the fevered divsions of the civil rights movement, Gourley was shot dead apparently by a black shooter who then escaped the scene. It was Nashville’s most publicized trial ever though whether justice was served or the old wounds of the south opened or healed is debatable.
And finally, a classic of Nashville crime writing. I admit we may have made light of the rather too frequent murder, kidnap or other crimes perpetuated by or against country music stars in Nashville-set crime fiction, but Masry Saum’s Willi Taft series is a golden oldie. A trilogy of books – Midnight Hour (2000); The Valley of Jewels (2001); and When the Last Magnolia Weeps (2003).
Willi Taft is a studio singer in Nashville who’s bored with her life. In Midnight Hour when she becomes suspected of murder, she realises nobody much is going to help her, and the country music business is not exactly a friendly place. In Valley of Jewels country music butts up against another southern obsession – the Civil War. First Civil War professor Jada Winston is murdered, then an opera star starts receiving racist letters. Two things connect these events: Northwest Alabama and a 135-year-old secret that Willi Taft sets out to reveal. And then in When the Last Magnolia Weeps, Willi (now a fully licensed PI) attends a Celtic Christmas concert only to find a bunch of Irish musicians accused of murder. Saums grew up in North Alabama and then moved to Nashville to work as a recording engineer on gold and platinum albums by Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and many other artists.
And that’s why Mary Saums and the Willi Taft series is so good and so emblematic of Nashville crime writing – country music, the South and then some more country music.
