By mixing dark secrets reminiscent of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! with the strong sense of place Conroy created in South of Broad and the class distinctions depicted in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Martin Hegwood has crafted a truly iconic multi-generational novel, Queen of Memphis (2024). The manuscript deservedly won the first-place award in the William Faulkner Literary Competition in 2022.The multi-generational story told in Queen of Memphis would make a riveting, entertaining television series, but by all means, cherish it first as the must-read Southern novel of the year. (Southern Literary Review, 2024)
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Welcome to my website! I’m Martin Hegwood, a writer from Pascagoula on the Mississippi coast, a small town where the beautiful Pascagoula River flows into the Gulf. It’s a quirky little place of marshes and moss-draped live oaks, of gators and pelicans and snowy-white egrets. Pascagoula is a shrimping and shipbuilding town in what I call Mississippi’s Low Country. While it may be Deep South, it’s not Old South; it’s the “working coast,” a city of broad shoulders, a place of action where stories naturally flow. Our native son Jimmy Buffett told a lot of these stories, but there are plenty left to tell. I’ve written a few stories myself, and not all of them are set here on the coast. If fact, my latest tale takes place in the far northern part of the state in and around Memphis. This newest story titled Queen of Memphis features LuAnn Collier, one of the toughest female protagonists you’ll find anywhere, and you’ll enjoy following her exploits and pulling for her as she struggles to claim her place at the top of Memphis society. In Queen of Memphis, LuAnn may be far away from any salt water, but she still swims in shark- filled waters, only these are, as my hero Jimmy Buffett put it, “the sharks that can swim on the land.”
Enjoy!
Purchase Books by Martin Hegwood
"Hegwood's first novel trails PI Jack Delmas from the Louisiana bayou to the French Quarter of New Orleans as he dodges murder accusations from every angle...Summertime readers will relish this saucy gumbo of backcountry adventure." (Publishers Weekly)
"If you can't actually get to the Gulf, I recommend purchasing a pound of peeled shrimp, whipping up a hotter-than-Hades cocktail sauce, pouring a glass of sweet lemon tea, and diving into The Green-Eyed Hurricane. As hurricanes are wont to do, the book will pick you up, toss you around, and leave you shaken--and invigorated." (Kelly Flynn)
"Hegwood's writing is...smooth and laid-back...Massacre Island displays Hegwood's strength's: his sharp eye for detail and local color, a knack for engaging characterizations, and a protagonist who's good company and able to relate his adventures in a laid-back narrative voice that nonetheless maintains tension and suspense." (The Drood Review)
"The "Redneck Riviera," aka the Mississippi coast, provides the sultry setting for Jackpot Bay, the fourth Jack Delmas novel (Massacre Island, etc.) from Martin Hegwood, senior attorney for the secretary of state's office of Mississippi. With a deadly gun battle at the Jackpot Bay casino, a sexy security auditor and a rock concert besieged by fundamentalists, Jack has plenty to straighten out in this fast-paced, hard-edged thriller." (Publishers Weekly)
"Hegwood’s characters clash over their desire for money, power, and prestige. Old moneyed families
fight to hold onto what they have and to make sure no sneaky newcomers creep into their tightly
controlled social circles. There are only two ways to join the most prestigious country club: you are
either born into an old-money family or you marry into it. And marrying into it might admit you to the
country club, but you are still suspect. The elite turn their noses up: you are really only as high class—or low class—as your people were...
The novel abounds in powerful scenes. There’s a Black funeral where the choir sings “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” “with a tone unmistakably African, that vocal distillations of pain and alienation with a faint undercurrent of hope that haunts the dark soil of the Delta.” There’s elderly Maggie Winnforth mentally lost in time in a department store. She thinks she’s a teenager again, trying on hats and feather boas and different shades of lipstick. There’s LuAnn discovering long-buried secrets about her family when she visits a nursing home. The novel has enough cheating husbands and wives, legislative shenanigans, dramatic deaths, and whiskey drinking to populate episodes of a television soap opera like Dallas for several years. And yes, the multi-generational story told in Queen of Memphis would make a riveting, entertaining television series, but by all means, cherish it first as the must-read Southern novel of the year." (Southern Literary Review, 2024)
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In The Press
Pascagoula Native Wins William Faulkner Literary Award
"The William Faulkner Literary Committee has selected Pascagoula native Martin Hegwood as the 2022 winner of the Novel Category for his manuscript titled Memphis."
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RICHARD LUCAS,
Mississippi Press
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