Take your pick: this Sunday, December 5, at either 3:30 a.m. or 5:30 p.m. (central time) , you can catch BookTV's taping of our event early last month with Mississippi journalist Curtis Wilkie. He was speaking about his new book, The Fall of the House of Zeus, a staff and customer favorite, our bestselling title last season, and a book that everyone in town has been reading and buzzing about for nearly two months now.
The book's popularity, which we expect to endure for years to come, has as much to do with the quality of the writing and reporting as it does with local interest in this home-grown scandal, which erupted in 2007 when Dickie Scruggs, one of the country's most successful trial lawyers, was indicted for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge.
Like all good scandals, there's a lot of fuzzy gray area, prompting discussion about what's right and what's wrong, where are the lines between guilt and innocence. And it's a story without heroes, according to Wilkie.
To all but the most avid of Mississippi political junkies, the Scruggs affair has remained an amorphous conspiracy these several years. The billionaire trial lawyer earned his comeuppance at the hands of government attorneys after months of investigations and trials, but the specifics were lost in a meaningless montage of ten o'clock news clips showing lawyers in suits, marching into Oxford courtrooms, and the avalanche of accusations and counter-accusations, political falderal, blustery op-eds and talk radio blather only added static to the noise.
In Wilkie's hands, the story is given not only definition, but a wide scope and classic themes. It's not merely judicial wrangling but Greek tragedy. "The story certainly has any number of elements of Greek tragedy," Wilkie told us. "The heroic figure rises to great heights, then is struck down by fatal flaws and comes crashing to earth. When I discovered that Zeus was Scruggs' fraternity nickname, the title fell in my lap."
Every bit as engaging as a Grisham thriller, The Fall of the House of Zeus charts Scruggs' scrappy rise from a broken home in south Mississippi to his ascension into upper crust Gulf Coast society. He earned the reputation as one of America's most successful trial lawyers after scoring billions in litigation against the asbestos and tobacco industry. His unprecedented settlements brought vast sums of money to the state, along with a passel of enemies.
Woven through Wilkie's deft reporting is a menagerie of lawyers and politicians from all over the state—well-known players and public officials, good ole boys on the national scene, others lurking in the shadows, all of them trading on astounding wealth, working impressive social connections, and seemingly hellbent on destroying one another. If you're tied in socially at all in the state, you're bound to know several players mentioned in the book.
One of the story's most fascinating figures is the notorious Greenwood farmer and political catalyst P.L. Blake, a dark and evasive character, whose backroom orchestrations set much of the action in motion. Blake was the hot topic during the Q&A session that followed Wilkie's discussion of the book. Wilkie even heard, at a recent signing in Birmingham, via Blake's lawyer that the man of intrigue had read and enjoyed the book.
While this is doubtlessly fascinating for Mississippians to read, the book should find an audience outside the state through Wilkie's expert handling of these universal themes. "It's basically the modern South that we're talking about," he said. "These aren't gothic characters but rather well-educated people, most of them lawyers, many of them wealthy. It's an entirely different kind of image that a reader on the East coast will have of Mississippi."
Get your signed copies of The Fall of the House of Zeus at Turnrow.
Thanks also to Charlie Smith of the Greenwood Commonwealth for sharing the photo of Wilkie.
