Interview by Michael O’Hearn

Photo submitted by Corinne Gerwe

Once upon a time, in the quiet town of Saluda, there lived a mystery novelist by the name of Dr. Corinne Gerwe. An Ohio native, she recently released the second book in what she hopes will be a 10-part series, called “Murder in a Moonlit Mason Jar,” set in the fictional town of Serena which is based upon the real town of Saluda.

Once a clinical associate professor at Clemson University with a doctorate in neuropsychology from Clemson and post-doctorate from Harvard, she said mystery novels allow her to delve deeper into the minds of humans as she writes her books. Gerwe lives in what used to be the First Baptist Church built in 1888 at the top of Church Street overlooking Saluda.

What got you interested in writing in the first place?

I’ve been writing all my life. When I was young, I was always writing poetry and things like that. I came by it naturally. My father was always writing in navy logs about what happened every day. My grandfather wrote a book and he was an artist. So I think it was inside of me to do it. I always thought it would be a wonderful thing to be a writer, but through most of my life I ended up working, and life takes over and takes you into other things.

What “other things” are you referring to?

My father was a WWII veteran and he suffered PTSD at that time. It was diagnosed as shell shock and due to his illness we went from a fairly stable family to him having a lot of problems. He ended up in the VA and when I was young I started going there because he was there a lot, and ended up getting into the field of psychology. I went to school and worked on the side until I eventually got my doctorate.

Throughout the years and working in the hospitals with people suffering from those kinds of symptoms − PTSD and other addiction related [issues] because addiction kind of goes hand in hand with it − I started writing case histories on my patients. I would have the medical chart but I thought it didn’t really reflect these people. I would go home at night and write a more in-depth case history on each one of them and ask them a lot of questions. I became fascinated with the stories of each individual person prior to their war experiences and adult conditions. I eventually wrote a book called “The Orchestration of Joy and Suffering” and that’s when I was doing some serious clinical writing.

Why are you a mystery novelist as opposed to any other genre?

I began to do research on high-profile people and found out it wasn’t just people who suffered from war experiences who had behavioral issues and conditions, but it can come from many experiences, like from your childhood. All through my life, and even as a child, I was really influenced by Sherlock Holmes. I love the Sherlock Holmes stories and actually ended up doing a case history on Conan Doyle in “The Orchestration of Joy and Suffering” because he had something in common with me. I found out when I was young that his father also had problems and would end up in the hospital and be institutionalized, and it affected him deeply and dramatically. I felt a kinship with him along with the Irish background.

I think I had an approach to my work, rather than a clinical approach, as an investigator. I found that I would work with patients as Sherlock Holmes did working a case. How does a person turn into a monster from a young child? How do my heroes take the shapes they take? How do they stay on the right side of things?

There had to have been a turning point for you from working in the hospitals and writing case studies to sitting down and becoming a professional novelist. What was that turning point?

In 2001, a drunk driver killed my husband David. I guess 2001 would be the catalyst for everything that followed. I had finished my book “The Orchestration of Joy and Suffering” and I was also published in a prestigious journal at the time, and so it was quite something for me. The only reason I was educated at the time was because of the hospitals and the doctors who made sure that I kept on. You would have never said I would become a writer so it was a big thing.

I remember walking out the front door telling David that I had just got the book published. That was in March, a week before he walked out the door and he and a coworker were on their way to Edneyville, and the car veered across the double yellow line and he was killed instantly. I was, at the time, working at a hospital in Asheville in the psychiatric ward. I thought I would die from this and I had to stop everything and I loved him very much. He always supported everything I did.

What happened next?

I got a call from the National Peace Foundation and they knew everything about me and asked me if I would take this job to go into the northern Urals of Russia to set up clinics because there was a heroin and AIDS epidemic going on there. This was in the mining region run by the SUAL Corporation. Our government had supported the mining region since WWII and Roosevelt had sent money to keep it going because it’s the second largest aluminum producer in the world. For military, that’s crucial.

They found me because I have an article out there about high-risk youth and they wanted somebody who knew something about addictions. I told them, you don’t understand, I can’t even get out of this chair. The lady said she would call me back in an hour. She did and asked me if I ever studied the Chinese calendar and I said no.  It’s used not only in China but in Russia as well, and she said it was the Year of the Snake, which meant if your whole world is turned upside down during the Year of the Snake, your next 12 years is destined. She said we would like your next 12 years. I thought, well, they might as well have it because I couldn’t see my future. The week of 9/11 I was on a plane for the northern Urals.

Gerwe spent nine of those 12 years in Russia and returned to the U.S. in 2010. She then published the first mystery novel in her 10-part series called “The Strange Case of the Doyle Diary Murders” in 2014. “Murder in a Moonlit Mason Jar” was published in 2016. Both can be purchased on Amazon or through her website www.corinnefgerwe.com. •