Joe LeValley, the author of five Iowa mysteries in four years, didn’t set out to write books, but that’s what he’s been doing since retiring in 2018 from a 30-year career as a hospital executive at Mercy Medical Center. from Iowa.
LeValley’s books are set in the fictional town of Orney, Iowa, and follow the personal and professional life of Tony Harrington, a reporter for the local newspaper The Town Crier.
As Tony moves and sometimes stumbles from one harrowing experience to another, readers also learn about the economic struggles facing small towns and local news organizations in the digital age.
The plots cut a wide swath. LeValley’s first story swept across the Iowa political landscape; his second effort focused on human trafficking. Next was a story involving organized crime, followed by a Hollywood murder mystery coming to Iowa. Her most recent book centers on an unsolved bank robbery and murder that occurred more than 50 years ago.
LeValley’s protagonist is too good to work in small-town journalism where the pay is low, a problem the author solves by giving Tony a backstory. Tony’s father, a successful novelist and screenwriter who teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has set up a trust fund to offset Tony’s living expenses.
Tony, of course, got into journalism for the right reasons. He took the reporting job at Orney because he wanted to work with the newspaper’s owner, Ben Smalley, who was a successful big-city journalist and had won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. (Spoiler alert: Tony also wins a Pulitzer for his work on Orney.)
More details of Smalley’s background are revealed in each novel, providing an explanation for why he cashed in his own fame and fortune for the Town Crier’s down payment.
After purchasing The Town Crier, Smalley hired Harrington and later bought the local Orney radio station, where Tony’s best friend and only competitor Doug Tenney works. With this miniature media empire, Smalley provides his county seat with news and publicity opportunities that keep it, if not vibrant, then at least viable.
There are several similarities between LeValley and Tony. They are both musicians; Tony plays the piano; LeValley plays drums and guitar and is a member of the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. LeValley grew up in Dayton, a small community south of Fort Dodge, in roughly the same location as Orney. And like Tony, LeValley was a reporter for the Iowa papers in Boone and Mason City.
It was in Mason City during the 1980s that a reader compared LeValley to Des Moines Register columnist Donald Kaul. And it’s where LeValley got the idea for what turned out to be his first Tony Harrington novel, “Burying the Lede.”
After covering six murder trials as a reporter, LeValley began drafting a whodunit and wrote six chapters before his day job and reality intervened.
When he married the girl he often flirted with in the court clerk’s office, LeValley realized that a reporter’s pay wasn’t going to cut it. He left newspapers in 1983 to work in community relations at Mercy’s Hospital in Mason City. From there, he earned an advanced degree in management, which led him to become a key executive at Iowa’s Mercy health care system.
As he prepared to retire, LeValley unearthed his first six chapters of “Burying the Lede” and over the next four months finished the book after soliciting and receiving advice from Des Moines-born novelist John Shors, among others.
As the book was coming out in late 2018, LeValley began researching her second book, “Cry from an Unknown Grave,” about human trafficking. She wrote it in just 33 days.
Three more books followed, each one a year apart. All involved considerable research and unusual writing technique.
Because LeValley’s stories revolve around a set of recurring characters (Tony’s family, friends, co-workers, and local, state, and national police), LeValley writes with two screens open on his computer. . As he creates the story on one screen, the second screen contains the names and attributes of all the characters that have appeared in previous Tony Harrington novels.
That way, when characters from previous stories resurface, as Tony’s father, mother, and sister often do, their arguments are consistent. It also makes it easy to select which character could perform specific actions.
Over time, readers come to know the entire town of Orney as if they lived there.
The technique also allows LeValley to experiment with new situations (domestic terrorism, for example, in an upcoming book) and take notes on how his characters might react to new challenges.
tony harrington novels
Published by BookPress Publishing; available at bookstores and online vendors, including Amazon.com and JosephLeValley.com
Book 1: Bury the Lede (2019)
Introduces readers to small-town reporter Tony Harrington, who doesn’t buy the official version of a rural Iowa murder. Includes many Iowa landmarks, including bike trails and presidential caucuses, and ends in the basement of the mansion Iowa Governor’s Terrace Hill.
Book 2: Cry from an uncharted grave (2020)
Tony and fellow reporter Madeline Mueller investigate a child sex trafficking ring after receiving a late-night call from one of the victims.
Book 3: The Third Side of Murder (2021)
Tony seeks the help of organized crime to learn the fate of a cousin who mysteriously fell to her death from a seawall near the family home in Italy.
Book 4: Make a Murder (2022)
Tony’s family is at the center of the murder of a Hollywood star in Orney, Iowa.
Book 5: Sophocles’ Rule (2022)
An unsolved bank robbery/murder in 1964 is behind the murder of one of Orney’s most prominent citizens with tentacles reaching into The Town Crier’s newsroom.