He’s also a good storyteller. His debut novel, “Grievances,” is “as riveting as the best Grisham courtroom thriller, one of the most deeply satisfying novels I have read in a long, long time,” according to author Pat Conroy.
On Tuesday, June 6, at 4 p.m. at The Country Bookshop, Ethridge will share his story of a reporter who uncovers the truth behind the 20-year-old unpunished, unsolved, even uninvestigated murder of an African-American boy during racial unrest in the rural South. Ethridge says that while he was inspired by an actual event, the story is fiction.
But the characters — even their names — in the fictional Charlotte Times newsroom, sound strikingly similar to Observer reporters and editors Ethridge worked with.
“Any sort of first novel, I suspect, has to have a lot of biographical elements,” he says. “You can only describe things that you’ve lived. I definitely put my journalism past to use, but everyone needs to remember that it’s a novel — it’s fiction.”
Ethridge’s alter ego is reporter Matt Harper, stuck on the night shift writing obits while trying to live up to his legacy as a third-generation reporter. In fact, Ethridge’s grandfather, Mark Ethridge Sr., was the publisher of the Louisville Courier Journal and was a journalism professor at Chapel Hill.
His father, Mark Junior, was the editor and publisher of the Lexington (South Carolina) “Dispatch News” and was professor of journalism at USC.
His grandmother, Willie Snow Ethridge, wrote 15 books on travel, history and biography, including “You Can’t Hardly Get There From Here,” and “As I Live and Breathe,” and won the 1982 N.C. Award for Literature.
In spite of his heritage, Ethridge never thought he would go into journalism. While going to college, he made money as a stringer for The Associated Press. In 1972 he started with The Charlotte Observer as an investigative reporter. By 1979, he was managing editor.
“Our mandate was to do tough, good investigative reporting, so that everyday, every week, readers were surprised and delighted to learn something in the newspaper that they wouldn’t find anywhere else,” he says.
As managing editor, he became the center of the firestorm when the paper investigated the Carolina textile industry, receiving its first Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1981 for the series, “Brown Lung: A Case of Deadly Neglect.”
In 1988, they received the paper’s second Pulitzer Prize for the story on Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, “revealing misuse of funds by the PTL television ministry through persistent coverage conducted in the face of a massive campaign by PTL to discredit the newspaper.”
Ethridge is also proud that he worked on the team that explored “Our Tobacco Dilemma,” the moral conflict of the state’s workers whose livelihood depended on a product that, when used as intended, could kill.
During the time Ethridge was with The Charlote Observer, the demand for newspapers to grow their profits changed the publishing landscape.
“Today it’s a different world in terms of daily newspaper management and production,” he says.
He left the publication in 1989 and became the publisher of The Business Journal, where he was for nine years. He left there to become the president of a Charlotte-based sports marketing company and to develop his own publishing company. He is now the president of Carolina Parenting, Inc., which publishes three monthly magazines in Charlotte, the Triad, and the Triangle.
Ethridge started writing “Grievances” in 2001 and finished it in 2003. He spent the next year trying to sell the manuscript to a publisher.
“Good writing ultimately gets published,” he says. “You need to have faith.”
When asked why, at age 56, he wanted to undertake a career that involves personal rejection, he says, “I spent days thinking about it. Why did I do it? The answer was…I love writing.”
He has nearly finished his second book and his third is planned. He lives with his wife, Kay, in Charlotte.
To reserve a signed copy or for information, call The Country Bookshop at 910-692-3211.
