I guess it was back about 1991 or so that I went through a brief
but intense Davis Grubb period.
Grubb, a West Virginia author, made a splash with his debut
novel, THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, a wicked tale about a homicidal preacher
chasing a couple of kids down the Ohio River after murdering their mother in
the early days of the Great Depression.
The novel earned good reviews, got a fair amount of
attention, and swiftly inspired a classic film with Robert Mitchum and Lillian
Gish mounted by one-time-only director Charles Laughton. James Agee wrote the
script that hews pretty closely to the original source material.
Back in the day, I made a kind of barnstorming run through
Moundsville and some parts of Wheeling that still smacked of Grubb country, but
it was a pretty informal and scattered pilgrimage.
In this month’s Crimespree (#49 should have hit store
shelves or mailboxes sometime over the last few days, or soon will), I write of
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and, particularly, its murderous inspiration and author.
I wrote the article over the Thanksgiving holiday where we
were staying in a mountain resort a short distance from Wheeling and more
significantly, from Moundsville, Davis Grubb’s long-ago abandoned hometown.
(Grubb spent most of his adult life in New York. When, closer to
the end of his life, a movie based on his book FOOL’S PARADE was filmed in
Moundsville and its world premier held there, Grubb took a taxi all the way from
NYC to Moundsville and back, racking up one of the world’s great cab fares.)
I decided to use my holiday proximity to spend a bit more
time in Grubb country for a second time; to see some key places that shaped the
author and to take a few pictures along the way (most of which do not accompany
the Crimespree article).
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER was based on the real life lonely hearts
murderer and so-called “Bluebeard” Harry Powers, a pretty twisted piece of work
who racked up a string of aliases and an unknown number of victims. In the
1930s, Powers was hanged in the fearsome-looking Moundsville Penitentiary,
which still looms a few blocks from the childhood home of Davis Grubb.
Powers is buried in a prison cemetery and figures
prominently in the museum room of the no-longer in service state pen, which is
open to the public for tours and whose walls in the old visitor's area are adorned with Davis Grubb
memorabilia.
In the course of preparing my Crimespree article, I toured
the prison and located Grubb’s old home. His family lost the place when Grubb
was still a child. They say Mr. Grubb was so attached to the old homestead that he carried
around a photo of the house for the rest of his life.
Grubb died in July 1980 in New York City.
A new independent film about Powers, and his inspiration of
Davis Grubb’s most noted novel, is also now making the rounds on the Indy film
circuit.
You can read more about that here, and even listen to a long-ago
popular song about the murders that inspired NIGHT OF THE HUNTER here.
If you wish to order or subscribe to Crimespree, you can do
so right here.
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