Edgar Awards Countdown: A Devil Went Down to Georgia

the one about the cold case killing of a Black socialite in Atlanta

In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the second installment: you can read about highway serial killers here. The awards will be announced April 30th!

A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and The Murder of Lita McClinton does the sort of work I complained was lacking in Long Haul, the last nominee I reviewed. Author Deb Miller Landau takes the 1987 murder of McClinton, a thirty-five-year-old Black woman, and uses it as a lens to explore how sociopolitical narratives and policies around domestic violence, interracial marriage, and institutional racism in the criminal justice system both have and have not changed in the nearly thirty years since Lita was shot in the doorway of her home. The case remained unsolved and largely unlitigated until her estranged husband James Sullivan was convicted of malice murder (he hired a hit man to kill Lita, largely to protect his considerable assets from their in-progress divorce settlement) in 2006.

The reasons Sullivan, poster boy for the ubiquitous “The husband did it” memes and merch, evaded justice for twenty years have everything to do with his money, his race, and his attendant privilege. Landau digs deep into the social scene in Palm Beach, where Lita and Jim lived and Jim continued to reside until he fled to Panama to evade arrest, and demonstrates how not only the formal institutions of criminal justice, but also the informal social norms of the very rich, are designed to shield people like Sullivan (white men) from punishment.

The book is compulsively readable. Landau can set a scene and describe a character in ways that make the reader feel immersed in Lita’s world, and deeply aggrieved at the way she was treated by Jim and the way she died. Her interviews with Lita’s parents and sister are particularly moving, and it’s clear she has gained the trust of the family over the decades she’s been reporting on the case. Landau foregrounds her personal connection to Lita’s murder in a way that feels authentic and earned. She makes the point that “Lita’s death sent reverberations through generations,” and she is careful to trace those echoes of trauma through family members that never met her, but still feel bereft at her loss. I did bump at a few moments in her prose when she seems to be getting a bit out over her skis in terms of editorializing the inner lives of the people she’s writing about. For example, she opines about the waning days of Lita’s marriage, “Now they are both driven by a force much greater than love: fear. Jim is afraid of losing everything, Lita of losing herself.” I suppose? We can assume that? But do we need to? Those sorts of moments make the book feel more gossipy and lazily written than it is.

The strength of A Devil is in its explicit and implicit argument: even though James Sullivan will die in prison, he should have been there a lot earlier than 2006. The questions with which Landau concludes the book—

Did Jim get away with murder for nearly twenty years because he was rich? Because he was white? Would he have gotten away with it so long if Lita were white? Would anyone (including me) have given the story attention if they were uneducated white people or poor Black people?

are ones with which some of the best true crime texts of this era wrestle.

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being me drinking a freshly brewed cup of espresso overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice and 10 being me as Patrick McGoohan discussing his least favorite role, the curmudgeonly surgeon Dr. Sid Rafferty (“...a disaster ... a total frustration from start to finish”), how annoyed will I be if A Devil Went Down to Georgia wins the Edgar? 3