Tales from the Writing Life – S. Thornton Harper, Author of The Alabama Tryst Murder Mystery

Join us as we welcome Sam Harper, author of The Alabama Tryst Murder Mystery.   This book revisits a 1927 double killing that shook Birmingham, and still raises hard questions today. At the center of the story are Auburn Moore and Ruby Thornton, two people whose secret relationship ended in a brutal crime on a lonely road. What followed was a case shaped by fear, rumor, class power, and the deep racial tension of the Jim Crow South. Harper looks beyond the first headlines and digs into the people, politics, and institutions around the case. The book follows the shifting crime scene, the uneven police work, the press coverage, and the larger forces that helped shape public memory. It also brings attention to the lives caught inside the story, not just the mystery itself. This is a careful account of how a violent event can be turned into a public narrative that hides as much as it reveals. The result is a true crime history that studies both the murders and the world that made them possible. Register at homewoodpubliclibrary.org.