SOURCE: “Surprise Ending,” in Richmond Times Dispatch, April 29, 1998, p. D1, D3.

[In the following review, McKelway extols the virtues of Tidewater Blood, noting that the book marks a departure for Hoffman due to its suspense thriller characteristics, whereas his other works typically feature philosophical examinations and deeper symbolic levels at their core.]

He doesn't remember exactly when the idea came to him, but it dawned on Virginia writer William Hoffman that murdering someone with a time-delayed explosion would make for a novel crime.

Fortunately, the idea has spawned a possible best seller rather than a police record.

In his new book. Tidewater Blood, Hoffman has allowed his fertile imagination to do away with a prosperous, unsuspecting chunk of Virginia aristocracy on the 250th anniversary of the family's arrival in the colony.

“No,” he said the other day from his Charlotte County farm, Wynyard, “I don’t have any enemies that I’m getting back at.”

Blowing up folks has not been Hoffman's meal ticket as a writer over his long career, one that runs back to the 1950s and has produced more than 50 short stories and 10 other full-length works.

These writings have thematically plumbed Southside and Tidewater Virginia history, religion and segregation, as well as the opening of the West Virginia coalfields.

Tidewater Blood, on the other hand, “just sort of turned into a suspense story,” Hoffman said almost apologetically.

“I just started out to write another book.”

The 290-page page turner is generating keen interest.

Hoffman's style and his deft, spare touch have been compared to those of Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Taylor; early praise for Tidewater Blood has been highflying even by dust-jacket standards.

“I was helpless in its grip,” noted reviewer Fred Chappell. The University of Virginia's George Garrett credited the story with “an elegant clarity of style” whose characters are “credible, interesting and fully dimensional.”

Paperback rights have been sold and the book is a selection of the Mystery Guild, Hoffman said.

At 72 years old and the recipient of some of the country's highest writing awards—the John Dos Passos Prize and the Goodheart Prize among them—Hoffman welcomed such reactions so late in his career.

“I was about ready to hang it up. I thought I was about at the end of the road,” Hoffman said. Now he's talking sequel possibilities with his publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, and making his first-ever publicity tour.

Hoffman will be reading at the Library of Virginia today at noon and will be signing books tonight at Book People and at Barnes & Noble on Huguenot Road.

Southside Virginia bookstores, especially Hoffman's hometown favorite at Charlotte Court House, are doing a land-office business with the book. Hoffman has his hand close enough to the pulse of things to relate that his novel is getting good display at bookstores as far away as Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

“What they're saying is this could be a breakout book for me, so there is a lot of talk going on about what comes next,” said Hoffman, whose 50-acre farm is a study in self-sufficiency and adventurousness.

At one point, when the writing wasn't going so well, Hoffman said, he considered getting into manufacturing horseshoes. Years ago, he proved his worth to area longtimers, not by his superb stories, but by building his own fences and installing a garden that became a local horn of plenty.

“Everything we ate came off the place,” he said.

Of course, there is more to Tidewater Blood than the mysterious destruction of a family of Virginia bluebloods on their Tidewater mansion's portico.

Hoffman's novel is the story, mostly, of a falsely accused, disinherited relative—one critic has already labeled Tommy Lee Jones as perfect for the part—and his frantic search for the true killer.

What Charles LeBlanc finds out about himself and his family makes for the novel's foundation and helps provide its twists and turns.

Almost every old-line Virginia family has a loose cannon like Charles roaming about the countryside, although Charles seems to rank at the bottom of the genre's gene pool. He's a saturnine ex-con whose threadbare existence in the swamplands comes to a forced end with the murders.

Led almost magically to West Virginia where a forebear helped secure the family wealth in the coal business at the turn of the century, LeBlanc manages to unearth a graveyard full of family skeletons who hold the key to his future and the crime.

Hoffman grew up in West Virginia and summered at Virginia day camps, eventually settling in Charlotte County and teaching at Hampden-Sydney College.

“He never followed the standard route to success,” said retired Longwood College professor Bill Frank, who's writing a biography of Hoffman. “I think he was very confident that he could remain in an area that he liked very, very much and sooner or later he would be recognized for the quality of what he was doing.”

Hoffman is regarded by fellow writers as a master of the trade and as someone who never indulged in the sex-and-gore mold for marketing success.

That’s true as well of Tidewater Blood, despite the plot line. There's a curvaceous potential love interest, for instance, but she lost an eye in a knife fight and is too wary of LeBlanc to fully trust him.

When the twosome rides off into the sunset (in a manner of speaking). Hoffman doesn't let her drop her guard.

“She's still got her shotgun,” he chuckled.

His descriptions show a sure feel for the Virginia landscape, especially the Northern Neck and York River areas.

He's just as sure in his descriptions of the West Virginia coalfields and the nearly deserted mining camp spawned by the LeBlanc coal empire.

That’s no accident, said Hoffman, whose family still holds ownership of heavily mined West Virginia coal reserves. A great grandfather, a Scottish immigrant, developed one of the state’s major coal deposits.

“I still remember staying with him from time to time,” Hoffman said of his ancestor. “Every night he had a Scotch and recited a poem by Robbie Burns.”

Hoffman's characters are true reflections of their environments: from an aloof, take-no-chances trust lawyer in downtown Richmond to the all-knowing one-eyed West Virginia barmaid to a mountaintop cave-dweller who robs the power company of copper-filled electrical lines.

From clumsy deputies to a secretive mountain sylph to a dismembered explosives expert, Hoffman gathers up a strange, tight-lipped cast that is more knowing of LeBlanc's past than even he is. What the tale lacks in depth, it makes up for in surprise and plot twists.

“This is a different course for me,” Hoffman said. “The other books had more of a symbolic, philosophical sort of underpinning.

“There is some of that here but it's mostly a book of suspense.”