In Conversation with Betsy Wakefield Teter

Join us for a free In Conversation event local author Betsy Wakefield Teter and her new book, A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg! She will be in conversation with fellow author John Lane ABOUT THE BOOK: Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, this historical account captures a South Carolina county’s most violent decade—a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents. lllustrated with dozens of photographs, A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg delves into the exploits of a crooked local attorney who became one of the nation’s most slippery con men, the controversial hanging of a teenaged girl, and the bedlam unleashed when a governor tried to crush the moonshine trade. All this chaos and more unfolds amid Spartanburg’s first economic boom, as cotton mills multiply across the county and the community becomes one of the South’s rising industrial powers, generating many great fortunes. Much of this decade’s history went up in flames in 1918, when a fire destroyed the downtown offices of Spartanburg’s daily newspapers, taking with it copies of the publications that had chronicled the city for decades. Only recently, with the digitization of major newspapers from Columbia, Charleston and beyond, has part of the record reemerged—thanks to correspondents who reported from Spartanburg and preserved news that the fire wiped from the city’s own archives. At once a gripping true narrative and richly researched local history, A Carnival of Crime reveals how ambition, corruption, and rapid economic change shaped the region in unexpected ways. The result is a vivid portrait of a community coming of age—where prosperity and violence often advanced side by side, leaving behind stories that still echo more than a century later. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A native of Spartanburg, Betsy Wakefield Teter graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in history and began a journalism career that took her to four newspapers across the Carolinas. She served as business editor and Sunday columnist for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal and later co-founded the Hub City Writers Project. In two decades as its executive director, she edited and published more than 80 books, including several important Spartanburg community histories. She is a recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts. ABOUT THE CONVERSATION PARTNER: John Lane is the author of two novels, Fate Moreland’s Widow and Whose Woods These Are. He has also published several dozen books of poetry and nonfiction. A cofounder of the Hub City Writers Project, he lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Never been to an In Conversation event? This is a free event with books available for purchase.