Alabama Authors: C Terry Cline & Judith Richards

In 2017 I wrote a post on this blog about Babs and Borden Deal, an Alabama couple [until their divorce] who both wrote numerous novels and short stories. This post is about a similar writing duo. 

Judith Richards died on September 23 of last year; she was born in Illinois. Her husband C. Terry Cline, a Birmingham native, died May 2, 2013. Cline and Richards married in 1979, and in addition to their own writing became well-known in the Fairhope area for their willingness to help younger writers.

Cline wrote for radio and television and ran an advertising agency before publishing his first novel, Damon, in 1975. He published nine more by 1989. Three of those are "borderline" science fiction according to his entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Other novels are thrillers. His final work, The Return of Edgar Cayce, claimed to be communications from the early 20th century psychic. Cayce had an Alabama connection; he operated a photography studio in Selma from 1912 until 1923. An eleventh novel, The Cordoba Connection, was left unfinished at Cline's death and completed by his wife and published in 2016. You can read more about his novels on GoodReads. 

Richards published seven novels between 1978 and 2015. Her first novel Summer Lightning features a young boy growing up in a migrant labor camp during the Great Depression. The later novel Thelonious Rising tells the story of a young boy in the time of Hurricane Katrina. Her novel Summer Lightning was chosen for a 1978 volume of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Read more about her work on GoodReads. Read more about her fascinating life in the obituary linked below. 

Both writers have stories included in the anthology edited by Sonny Brewer, Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe published in 2002. Cline's is "S.Trident" and Richards' is "How the Story Ends." The biographical note for Richards notes, "Summer Lightning, which is about her husband, author C. Terry Cline, Jr., has been published in seventeen languages..."

Unfortunately, neither author has an entry in Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia of Alabama. 

Source: An article about horror writers with Alabama connections at al.com

C. Terry Cline's books

Damon (1975)
Death Knell (1977)
Cross Current (1979)
Mind Reader (1981)
Missing Persons (1982)
The Attorney Conspiracy (1983)
Violated (1984)
Prey (1985)
Quarry (1987)
Reaper (1989)
The Return of Edgar Cayce (2011)
The Cordoba Conspiracy (2016)

Photo from her obituary at al.com

Judith Richards' books:

Summer Lightning (1978)

Triple Indemnity (1982)

Seminole Summer (1987)

After the Storm (1987)

Too Blue to Fly (1997)

Thelonious Rising (2014)

The Sounds of Silence (2015)