Ralph Ellis no longer has long hair and a love for smoking pot like his protagonist in “The Accident Report” (Photo by Jim Harrison)
Newspaper reporters were once powerful enough to topple a government using only their typewriters. Watergate sent countless scruffy idealists to J-school to emulate Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Atlanta newsman Ralph Ellis was one of them, and, for his fiction debut, he draws upon his halcyon memories in The Accident Report, a cagey, comic novel about a small-time journalist with delusions of grandeur.
Clearly trained not to bury the lead, Ellis opens his tale with certain scene-setting cultural signifiers: “On the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Ronald Truluck drove the long way to work so he could smoke a celebratory joint. … The wind whipped his shoulder-length hair. He clicked on the AM radio. The guitar solo on the Allman Brothers’ ‘Ramblin’ Man’ rang out of the little speakers.” Welcome back to 1974.
Truluck is a scrappy but feckless police reporter at The Eagle, which genially covers Millerton, North Carolina, a somnolent textile town, with a front page full of “pet-of-the-week” photos and new garden club officers. Bored with his beat and antsy for a scoop, Truluck finally gets a tip: City Council member Lamont Moody drunkenly crashed his Bonneville into someone’s bird bath, and the police let him walk away. Nobody much cares, except Truluck. Smelling a coverup, he launches a breathless investigation of “Lamontgate” with a cast of eccentric characters familiar to anyone who has ever tried (and failed) to gin up excitement in a small town.
“I enjoyed this novel of a young reporter at his first newspaper job showing both his self-importance and his insecurities,” said Charlene Ball, who wrote Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer. “Ronald [Truluck] is so believable, frustrating and sympathetic as he struggles to make his mark as an investigative reporter. [His] bumbling yet dogged determination to break a story of scandal in City Hall brings results, if not the ones he hopes for. It is all laugh-out-loud funny.”
Author and reader Ron Aiken put it more bluntly: “The novel’s strengths are the whiplash dialogue and Ronald Truluck. I wanted to hug him and give him a swift kick in the ass at the same time.”
The stakes of our hero’s quest may sound penny-ante, but suspense runs high with well-timed, unexpected twists in the story line and a triumphal resolution. “Ralph proves himself as a novelist in many ways, especially how he cleverly uses satire,” said Editor Janie Mills. “Readers are captivated by his story and his artful blending of the characters and narrative. Then, he surprises them with something they could not have anticipated.”
Undergirding all the humor is a veteran’s master class on how to chase down a story — the paper trail, tight-lipped sources and red herrings. Newshounds will delight in all of these details, which ring true, but you need not have typed an obit to enjoy The Accident Report. Thanks to Ellis’ deft storytelling, it plays out like a cozy mystery told in tones of hard-boiled noir with more than a dash of autobiography. Its authenticity, Ellis said, derives from lived experience.
“I had long hair and smoked a lot of pot — then,” Ellis, 72, said of his early years on the job. “I am no longer a committed pothead. And the cluelessness! I was even more clueless than Ronald back then.”
Ellis grew up in Waynesville, North Carolina. He launched his journalism career in the late 1960s at an underground newspaper created to protest his high school’s repressive dress code. (His main argument, that Jesus had long hair, did not sway the conservative school board.) He attended the University of North Carolina and then went to work at The Times in Thomasville.
No stranger to scoops, he has toiled at newspapers all over the South: Conway, Myrtle Beach and Charleston, South Carolina; Alexandria, Virginia; and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, culminating in his handling of national and international stories at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and CNN. His work also has appeared in The New York Times. He is married to food writer and editor Susan Puckett, so there’s no shortage of shop talk in their Decatur parlor.
“In the past, newsrooms tended to look alike, with wood paneling, beige carpet and a lot of cigarette smoke hanging in the air, and the newsroom was always wide open, where anyone could just walk in,” he recalled.
Not glamorous but nevertheless full of shabby romance for those who were there, The Accident Report is a loving tribute to old-school, shoe-leather reporting and establishes Ellis as a first-rate satirist. His ink-stained themes feel bittersweet today, though, without the reassuring background noise of a roaring press. As of last year, only a third of the more than 1,000 daily newspapers still print seven days a week, leaving many of us to languish in “news deserts.” More and more, coverage of current events — even pets of the week — is atomized into blogs, Substacks and social media, all of it salubriously smoke-free. Is there still a place for a hungry, hard-nosed journalist?
Aiken observed, “Generation Z might dominate today’s cultural spotlight, but Ralph Ellis’ Ronald Truluck reminds us that the struggles of young men — identity, purpose and belonging — are timeless.”
It’s a good thing. Ellis is planning a series to follow Truluck’s misadventures. Maybe there is a Pulitzer in his future yet, if he ever cuts his hair.
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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal and Country Living. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.
