Ralph Ellis will visit City Lights on Saturday, February 7th at 3:00pm to share his new novel, THE ACCIDENT REPORT, in conversation with Susan Puckett.
It’s the summer of 1974, and Woodward and Bernstein have vanquished Nixon from the White House. In a sleepy North Carolina textile town, rookie reporter Ronald Truluck is bored with writing about lawn mower thefts when he gets a tip - city councilman Lamont Moody got drunk, drove his Bonneville off the road, and ripped up somebody’s front yard. But the police let him walk away.
Recognizing a cover-up when he sees it, Ronald vows to break Lamontgate and make his bones as a serious journalist. It won’t be easy. Ronald is a long-haired pothead who’s loosey-goosey with the facts. His paper, The Eagle, runs pet-of-the-week photos on the front page, not corruption stories. And the linchpin source only wants to talk about his book of poetry, not the accident. With a little help from his brainy girlfriend and the flower-child city hall reporter, Ronald lands the story - with results nobody expected.
Ralph Ellis launched his journalism career in the late 1960s by editing an underground newspaper created to protest his high school’s repressive dress code. His main argument, that Jesus had long hair, didn’t sway the school board.
A native of Waynesville, NC, he graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he majored in marijuana, minored in journalism, and wrote a few stories for the school paper, The Daily Tar Heel. His first newspaper job was police reporter for The Times in Thomasville, NC. Thomasville was known as The Chair City because of its many furniture factories—and for the 30-foot-high, steel-and-concrete chair the town fathers built to celebrate that industry.
He loved covering the police beat because of the variety. He wrote about murder, bloody car wrecks, and a man who went to the ER because his dog attacked him. When Ralph arrived at the house for the interview, he found out the dog was still in a biting mood. He went to the ER for a tetanus shot, then wrote a story about it. He next became sports editor and county government reporter for a now-defunct weekly in Conway, SC, called The Field and Herald—not to be confused with Field and Stream.
Susan Puckett is a James Beard-nominated food journalist and editor who has authored or collaborated on more than a dozen books. She was the food editor for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for nearly 19 years and today, as a freelance writer and editor, contributes to its Food section and other media outlets.
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