271 EX-MTSU PROF TAKES READERS ON A CUMBERLAND MOUNTAIN HIGH

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Feb. 16, 2007
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081


You Can Call Him ‘Jack’ or You Can Call Him ‘Justin’—Just Call Him a Novelist

(MURFREESBORO) – Dr. Jack Justin Turner, professor emeritus of political science, will discuss his novel, The Sheriffs’ Murder Cases (Chestnut Hill, 2006), at 2:30 p.m., Thursday, Mar. 1, in Room 103 of the Paul W. Martin Sr. Honors Building. This event is free and open to the public.
Turner, who specialized in international relations at MTSU, will read selected portions of his book (Chestnut Hill, 2006), the first volume of what Turner calls the “Cumberland Mountain Trilogy.” Volumes II and III are slated to be released in July 2007 and January 2008, respectively.
A native of Maytown, Ky., Turner, drew from his roots to tell the story of Jake Herald, High Sheriff or Chief Deputy of Chinoe County from 1920-1945. Herald earns a bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso University and pursues a medical degree at the University of Louisville, only to leave with a year remaining to fight in World War I.
When Herald returns home, he finds the area infiltrated by coal companies and the overall environment much rougher than he remembers. He thrusts himself into law enforcement to find out who killed one of his friends. It’s the first of several murders Herald will try to solve.
“I think of Jake Herald as a kind of a mixture, and it’s a strange mixture, of Hamlet, maybe, and Dirty Harry,” Turner says, referring to William Shakespeare’s tragic prince and Clint Eastwood’s vigilante movie detective. “He likes to think about things and work them out, but once he gets started, he’s capable of taking extreme action, if necessary.”
Known as “Justin” as an author and “Jack” to his friends, Turner says he made a concerted effort to avoid stereotypes of mountain people as ignorant and uneducated. For example, the novel is free of any sort of dialect.
“I talked to so many people in getting material for this book I got to where I could speak the way they could again,” Turner says. “I just wrote the way they actually talked.”
Turner says another overly simplistic image promoted by some authors is the concept of the evil coal company executives who try to cheat the poor, dumb mountaineers out of their land.
“Around where I grew up, that didn’t happen very often because the mountaineers were as shrewd as they were,”Turner says. “People still owned their mineral rights and still sold them off when they felt like it.”
Also, there are numerous footnotes in the back of the book to introduce the uninitiated to the meanings of terms such as “Blind Tiger” and “ambeer.”
“A lot of people will read the footnotes first, and they seem to enjoy that a great deal,” Turner says.
Turner earned his bachelor’s degree from Berea College in 1959 and his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1969. He was a full-time faculty member at MTSU from 1965 to 2000.
Turner’s campus appearance is sponsored by the Dr. Virginia Peck Trust and the Departments of English and Political Science. The trust is named for the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and a former member of the MTSU Department of English. Her bequest to the university upon her death has been used to provide cash prizes for writing awards, fund an annual workshop on composition theory and practice, and facilitate visits by scholars, creative writers and other artists.
A book signing will follow Turner’s talk. For more information, contact Connie Huddleston, events coordinator for the College of Liberal Arts, at 615-494-7628, or chudd@mtsu.edu. To learn more about The Sheriffs’ Murder Cases, go to http://www.chestnuthillpublishing.com.

--30—

ATTENTION, MEDIA: For a black-and-white jpeg photo of Dr. Jack Justin Turner, contact Gina Logue in the Office of News and Public Affairs at 615-898-5081 or gklogue@mtsu.edu.