Query Letter: Streets of Nashville: Murder Meets Classic Country

I’ve always been fascinated by artists/authors who shift between genres and mediums. As a writer Michael Amos Cody wears a lot of hats. He spent the eighties as a songwriter in Nashville. Since then, he’s published poems, scholarly articles, a coming-of-age novel, and an award-winning short story collection. As if that weren’t enough, Cody earned a PHD and works as a professor teaching Native American literature, early American literature, and mythology.

His upcoming literary suspense novel, STREETS OF NASHVILLE (2025) mines Cody’s own rich history. The book telling the story of a struggling Nashville songwriter, who witnesses a homicide and in the process, becomes an object of fascination for the killer.  Since the novel combines two of my passions – crime fiction and old-time country – I’ll definitely be reading.

Cody was kind enough to share the query that landed him a deal with Madville Publishing, a small, independent press with nonprofit 501(c)(3) status.  (Note: from a glance at their submissions page they don’t appear to be accepting full-length manuscripts at the moment but I believe they take unagented submissions when they're open).

Greetings:

I hope you will consider my novel, STREETS OF NASHVILLE, for publication by Madville Publishing. STREETS is a completed 88,500-word adult literary suspense novel set largely in the vicinity of Nashville’s Music Row, where identities can get lost behind stage names and where morality can take a back seat to murky ambitions and desires.

In early March, 1989, a man in black murders a music chart analyst on famed 16th Avenue. Fifteen days later, gunfire echoes along the Row again when four people are shot—three fatally—in the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning. Tenderfoot songwriter Ezra MacRae—out on the town to celebrate the first good fortune he has had with his songs (after six years in Music City)—witnesses the triple homicide, but the masked gunman spares him. While Nashville Metro PD’s investigation progresses, the killer develops an obsession with Ezra—calling him, following him, haunting him, but not eliminating him. Ezra tries to carry on with his songwriting, maintain his day job cleaning pools, and assist in the investigation as he can. When the methodical mind behind the Easter killings begins to unravel, the violence—including the threat to Ezra—escalates in Nashville and moves toward a final confrontation in an isolated farmhouse near Ezra’s hometown of Runion, in the North Carolina mountains.

Two additional Ezra MacRae novels are in progress.

In terms of genre, STREETS OF NASHVILLE is similar to the work of Edgar Award winners James Lee Burke and Steven Womack, authors who employ criminal elements and Southern urban settings—Womack’s Harry Denton series, in fact, is set in Music City. My novel also shares characteristics with the work of such Appalachian writers as Chris Offutt, Sharyn McCrumb, and Ron Rash, exploring how mountain communities and mountain people respond to the invasion of criminal elements.

I spent my formative twenties living and working as a songwriter in Nashville, TN. This was during the 1980s, the last decade that the Nashville music business operated via traditional modes of recording studios, song publishing, record promotion, and so on. My first novel, GABRIEL'S SONGBOOK (Pisgah Press 2017) is a coming-of-age novel that explores the same time period in Nashville and also establishes my fictional community of Runion in the mountains of western North Carolina. Runion is further developed as the setting for my collection of linked stories, A TWILIGHT REEL (Pisgah Press 2021), winner of the Short Story / Anthology category in the Feathered Quill Book Awards 2022.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

All best--

Michael Amos Cody