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Savannah knows how to keep a secret. It is a city that appears to exhale its past: warm, humid, and faintly perfumed by the sweet decay of magnolia. Its historic squares, verdant, geometric, and improbably serene, feel like rooms in an open-air museum curated jointly by horticulturalists and ghosts. The live oaks sag under the weight of both Spanish moss and accumulated rumor. In this landscape of genteel façades and spectral whispers, Dr. Mark Murphy has found not just a setting for his fiction but a kind of spiritual homeland. He calls Savannah “America’s most haunted city,” and one suspects the phrase is more observation than hyperbole.
His new novel, Rose Dhu, makes full use of the city’s paradoxical charm. The book begins with the disappearance of Dr. Janie O’Connor, a respected surgeon whose vanishing from her historic estate rattles Savannah’s social order with the quiet violence of long-hidden truth. Her former lover, Philip Caruthers, a man fortified by wealth and undone by lineage, becomes the inevitable suspect. The investigation falls to Detective Frank Winger, whose personal history with the O’Connors complicates every aspect of the investigation. What emerges is a Southern Gothic mystery, but also a metaphysical meditation on surface and depth, appearance and rot.
Dr. Murphy himself exists at a fault line between two identities: physician and novelist, empiricist and fabulist. By daylight, he is a gastroenterologist, parsing symptoms with clinical precision. Before the sun rises on weekend mornings, he writes fiction that revels in ambiguity. The duality has shadowed him since childhood. His father was a surgeon, his mother, an English teacher. The son inherited both vocations, though not simultaneously. “My high school English teacher told me a long time ago,” he recalls, “‘go into the sciences because you can always write. But if you go into literature… they’ll never let you back into the science realm.’” The warning had the ring of prophecy. Dr. Murphy chose marine biology, imagining a future of adventure.
The ocean disabused him quickly. “I spent about six months at sea,” he says, “and realized I was not going to do that for a living. I was not Jacques Cousteau. I did not have independent wealth, like Jacques Cousteau did. And frankly… it is not as romantic as it seems.” He returned to medicine, “dragged,” as he puts it, “not screaming but somewhat reluctantly” to a profession that suits him. But writing had already embedded itself in his muscle memory, the way some people hum without realizing they’re doing it. He produced a mimeographed newspaper in fourth grade, a PTA play the next year. Throughout his life, writing has persisted.
That endurance is evident in Rose Dhu. Like many physician-authors, Dr. Murphy writes from a vantage point sharpened by proximity to life’s extremes. Ethan Canin once remarked that doctors, like soldiers, witness things that leave a residue. Dr. Murphy agrees. Medicine taught him to attend to details so minute they border on invisible, the twitch of a muscle, the shift of a tone, but which, taken together, reveal a story. Diagnosing, in this sense, is adjacent to characterization. “Little tiny details,” he says, “help you make a diagnosis. And they’ll help you add depth or perception to what’s going on with a character.”
His characters resist moral categorization. Philip Caruthers, scion and suspect, is rendered with a surprising tenderness. “We’re all ambiguous,” Dr. Murphy says, citing Star Wars as his case study in moral tension, Luke Skywalker redeeming the father who nearly destroyed him.
Janie O’Connor, though absent, commands the narrative. In an earlier, more unwieldy iteration of the novel, she possessed an entire parallel storyline. On editorial advice, Dr. Murphy excised it. “It became Frank’s book,” he explains. Yet Janie remains omnipresent, refracted through others’ recollections, “seen through the different facets of a crystal.” The excision was emotionally difficult. Another scene was physically so. A sexual assault, essential to the plot, left him “nauseous” after writing it.
Savannah itself is not merely a backdrop but a co-conspirator. Flannery O’Connor, another native daughter, “set the bar” for the Southern Gothic atmosphere Dr. Murphy conjures. The terrain gives him a certain advantage. He lives on the real Rose Dhu Road, once a plantation visited by George Washington. The name, Gaelic for “beautiful view”, is both description and faint misdirection, given the darker histories it conceals. Even the supernatural seems to cluster around him. A ghost tour once informed him that his father-in-law “allegedly haunts a pub he used to own.” Murphy relays this with the amused resignation of someone for whom such news is neither surprising nor particularly inconvenient.
Writing Rose Dhu required three and a half years and four complete rewrites. His first novel, a “stillborn” attempt written by chasing inspiration wherever it drifted, taught him the limits of improvisation. “Long fiction,” he says, “is like giving birth to an elephant.” Now he writes from an outline, an anchor as much as a map.
Still, the outline is a mechanism for misdirection. Dr. Murphy’s goal is narrative sleight-of-hand. He dislikes predictability; he wants to disorient just enough that the reader must pay attention. “I usually know who the killer is within fifteen minutes,” he says of most films. “That kind of straightforward writing bores me.” In life, he insists, he is a terrible liar, a man whose poker face is so porous he is riddled with “tells.” But in fiction, duplicity becomes an art form. He wants to deceive you, but elegantly, to hide the killer in plain sight, to make you interpret the signs, to look again at what you thought you understood.
This is, in the end, the physician’s signature: the belief that truth resides not on the surface but in the subtleties, in the faint clues that accumulate within shadows. Mark Murphy’s Savannah, lush, haunted, and withholding, is the perfect stage for this worldview. A city that keeps its secrets requires a writer who knows how to keep one, too.
Learn more about Mark Murphy.