Fairhope novelist C. Terry Cline Jr., whose suspense and crime novels have spanned decades, says the roots of his career trace back to a violent scene he witnessed as a child: a man cutting the throat of a woman, then standing over her on the front steps as she died. It is an extraordinary thing to carry from childhood into a life’s work, and Cline has done precisely that, channeling the memory into an examination of violence and the people who commit it that has run through his books for more than 40 years.
“Death, especially violent death, is the most traumatic occurrence in the affairs of humankind,” Cline said, describing the encounter. “Thereafter, I have always been interested in what creates a criminal and what makes them do the things they do.” That interest — not in violence for its own sake but in the origins of the people who cause it — is what separates Cline’s suspense fiction from the genre’s cheaper imitations, and it is the thread he says ties his entire catalog together.
Cline said it took him 25 years to master suspense writing well enough to feel confident in the genre. “Only a few writers do it well. I wanted to be one of the best in the field,” he said. The admission is a striking one from a writer with a long list of published novels to his name, and it reflects the particular craft that suspense demands: the ability to build tension across hundreds of pages while keeping readers inside the mind of a killer or the fear of a victim without letting either collapse into caricature.
A Body of Work Built on Dark Subjects
Asked which of his books he would recommend as an introduction for Coastal Alabama readers, Cline said his wife points to “Missing Persons,” a novel drawing on the personality of serial killer Ted Bundy. The book, along with the rest of his catalog, is being made available on Kindle, Mobipocket and iPhone platforms, he said — a move that brings decades of out-of-print or hard-to-find titles within reach of a new generation of readers who consume books on screens rather than shelves.
The digital release matters for an author whose work appeared largely in an era of paperbacks and library copies. Readers who heard of Cline’s novels by reputation had few reliable ways to find them; now the full catalog sits a download away. For a writer whose subject matter — the psychology of criminals and the investigators who pursue them — has only grown more relevant in the true-crime era, the new availability positions his older work for discovery by readers who were not yet born when much of it was first published.
Of his own favorite among his novels, Cline pointed to “The Attorney Conspiracy.” “If you want to know what went wrong with America, read this one,” he said. The endorsement is characteristically blunt from a writer who has never softened his opinions for print, and it points readers toward the book Cline himself considers the fullest statement of what he has been trying to say across his career.
A Lighter Project Ahead
Cline said he is now working on a book he hopes will be humorous, tentatively titled “Save Any Business,” describing it as a tongue-in-cheek look at keeping a livelihood afloat. The pivot from serial-killer suspense to business comedy is a wide one, but Cline frames it as a natural next act for a writer who has spent decades inside dark subject matter and sees no contradiction in stepping out of it for a while.
He joked about his qualifications for writing comedy given his home life: “I am married. My first wife, Linda Cline, and my now-and-forevermore wife, Judith Richards, have not laughed at a word I’ve said since 1959 and 1979, respectively.” The line is delivered with the timing of a man who has told it before, and it doubles as a portrait of a household that has produced more than one professional novelist across two marriages.
Cline and Richards, herself a published novelist, live in Fairhope, where both continue to write. The town on Mobile Bay’s eastern shore has a long history as a haven for writers and artists, a reputation that dates back more than a century to its founding as a utopian community and its subsequent draws of visiting literary figures. For Cline, the town has been both home and vantage point — a place to write about the darkest corners of human behavior while living on one of the quietest streets in Coastal Alabama.
That combination of setting and subject is less contradictory than it appears. Suspense writers, by their own account, tend to be observers rather than participants, and the discipline of daily work in a quiet town is what allows the imagination to travel where the subject matter requires. Fairhope’s literary tradition has always included writers who looked outward at the wider world from the bay’s shoreline, and Cline’s decades of crime fiction fit squarely within that pattern.
Advice for Aspiring Writers
Asked what advice he would offer other Coastal Alabama writers, Cline was blunt: learn a trade first. “Learn plumbing. You’ll make more money, and you’ll always be welcome, even with muddy boots on a shag carpet,” he said. The humor carries a serious point that working writers repeat almost universally: the economics of fiction make it a poor plan to count on writing alone for a living, and a practical skill provides both income and the freedom to write without desperation shaping the work.
“However, if you insist on writing, do it because you love it, and don’t give up. Persistence is the key to eventual success. It isn’t easy, but when you finally get published, it’s the most gratifying thing imaginable,” Cline said. The two halves of his advice — keep a trade, but persist — summarize a career that took 25 years to master its craft and decades more to sustain itself, and they come from a writer who has watched plenty of talented people quit before the work paid off.
Four Decades of Suspense From the Eastern Shore
Cline’s career spans an era in which the suspense genre transformed around him. The writers who dominated the field when he began — the architects of the modern psychological thriller — built their readerships in paperback racks and word of mouth, and the craft of sustaining dread across a full novel was learned largely by doing it badly for years before doing it well. Cline’s 25-year apprenticeship, by his own description, put him in that tradition: writers who treated suspense as a discipline to be mastered rather than a formula to be followed.
His fascination with what creates a criminal has aged well. The questions he was asking decades ago — about the childhood wounds, psychology and choices that produce violent people — have since become the standard territory of true-crime documentaries, forensic psychology and an entire shelf of nonfiction. “Missing Persons,” built on the personality of Ted Bundy, anticipated the appetite that has since made such subjects mainstream, which is part of why the decision to bring his catalog to e-readers now feels less like an archive project than a rediscovery.
The availability of his books on Kindle, Mobipocket and iPhone platforms also opens his work to readers in a market that barely existed when the novels were new. Digital shelves do not go out of print, and for an author with decades of titles, that permanence means the books can find their audience gradually, one recommendation at a time, rather than disappearing when a print run ends. For Coastal Alabama readers, it means one of the region’s most durable suspense writers is finally easy to find.
Still Writing in Fairhope
The tentative “Save Any Business” will be, by Cline’s description, a change of pace rather than a departure from form — the same observational eye that dissects criminals turned instead on the absurdities of keeping an enterprise alive. Whether the humor lands as well as the suspense has, readers will decide, but the project itself says something about the author: after decades of dark subjects, he is still curious, still writing daily, and still willing to try something he has never done before.
He and Judith Richards make up one of Coastal Alabama’s quieter literary households — two published novelists under one roof in a town that has drawn writers for more than a century. Both continue to work, and both have built careers that lasted long enough to see the publishing industry change around them entirely, from typewriter paperbacks to phone screens.
For a region that has produced more than its share of storytellers, Cline’s longevity offers its own kind of instruction, one that matches his advice to aspiring writers exactly: learn something practical, write because you love it, and do not give up. The man who witnessed violence as a child, spent 25 years learning to write about it well, and is now attempting comedy in his eighth decade of life has followed that formula longer than most — and, by his account, still finds the work as gratifying as the day he first saw his name on a published book.