Gin Phillips was on her stomach in a cave, crawling into a slot in a rock barely two feet high.
The Birmingham, Alabama, novelist had signed up for a three-hour wild caving expedition at Raccoon Mountain in Chattanooga, where walking wasn’t always an option. There were times when she crawled on her belly and scrambled on her hands and knees. At one point, she used her hands and feet to bridge her body across a chasm.
By the time she returned home, she’d brought part of the cave with her.
“When I showered, I could hear gravel from my hair hitting the shower floor,” Phillips says.
For Phillips, research meant more than studying photographs and reading about caves. If she was going to send her characters underground, she was willing to crawl through the rock herself.
Phillips’ seventh novel, “Ruby Falls,” takes readers beneath Lookout Mountain for a historical murder mystery inspired by the real-life discovery of the Chattanooga attraction in 1928.
The novel follows Ada Smith, a middle-aged woman who discovers a sense of freedom and adventure exploring the caverns inside Lookout Mountain. When a publicity event featuring a mind reader and his entourage ends in murder underground, Ada must help guide the group out of the mountain while knowing the killer is among them.
Into the darkness
The idea began to form several years ago when Phillips, who grew up close to Chattanooga and was well-acquainted with the ubiquitous Ruby Falls signs, finally went underground herself. She knew almost immediately that she wanted to set a novel there.
Stepping off the elevator introduced Phillips to a landscape unlike anything above ground and to the startling realization that an entire world had always existed beneath her feet without her knowing it.
“I think that’s an interesting place to start a book – when you feel like a toddler who doesn’t know anything,” she says.
Then Phillips heard the story of Leo Lambert, who had set out in the 1920s to reopen Lookout Mountain Cave, a cavern system once accessible from the Tennessee River side of the mountain. His ambitious plan called for drilling an elevator shaft from the top of Lookout Mountain to the cave below.
During the work, crews encountered an opening in the rock. Lambert crawled into it and spent hours exploring a previously unknown passage that led him to an underground waterfall.
He named it Ruby Falls after his wife.
Phillips was fascinated by what made Lambert go looking.
“The question was, what crazy person sees a hole in the rock leading into darkness and thinks, ‘I’m going to go in there and see what I find?’” Phillips says.
The question of what drives someone into the rock and darkness became one of the foundations of the novel, as did the year of Lambert’s discovery.
Phillips set her story against the economic uncertainty surrounding the beginning of the Great Depression. Below ground was a world waiting to be explored; above ground, the familiar world was becoming more and more precarious.
“What might draw someone into this whole separate world underground at a time when the world above ground is falling apart?” Phillips says.
For Ada, that question is personal. She’s reached middle age after enduring significant loss, and the conventional story she was taught to expect from life, including marriage, children and the future that follows, hasn’t unfolded for her.
Phillips was interested in what the caves might offer a woman living at a time when expectations and opportunities above ground could be sharply limited. For Ada, the answer includes a growing awareness of her own capability.
In the caves, she learns that her body can carry her wherever she’s physically capable of going, while the restrictions governing the world outside suddenly matter less.
Going underground
To understand that feeling well enough to put it on the page, Phillips decided she needed more than a conventional cave tour. Her wild-caving trip at Raccoon Mountain provided it.
Phillips expected to be conscious of the darkness and of the immense weight of the mountain surrounding her. Instead, the experience produced almost the opposite sensation.
“My entire world shrank down to this one circle of light from my helmet, and everything outside of it disappeared,” she says. “I was completely focused on that beam of light and moving my arms and legs, thinking only about where I was going next.”
There was freedom in that narrowing of her world, Phillips continues. The responsibilities waiting above ground, from family and household problems to work deadlines and everything else demanding attention, disappeared. The immediate physical challenge was all that mattered: getting up a wall, through an opening or around the next obstacle.
“There’s something transcendent about making the rest of the world go away, whether it’s worrying about your parents or kids, getting the plumber out or meeting a work deadline,” Phillips says.
That experience found its way into Ada, whose first encounters with the caves borrow from Phillips’ own, including the way the beam from a headlamp reduces the world to what’s visible and the satisfaction that comes from discovering what the body can accomplish.
Understanding the physical reality of caving, Phillips says, was essential to making the underground portions of the novel convincing.
“I couldn’t have written this book without understanding the textures, rhythms and feel of the caves,” she says.
The geography beneath Lookout Mountain also gave Phillips an unusual historical playground. When Lambert’s crews encountered the opening that led to Ruby Falls, they were drilling toward caverns farther below, and both levels were accessible to visitors during the period Phillips depicts.
Most of the novel’s action unfolds underground. Phillips uses the recognizable Ruby Falls cavern but takes some liberties once her characters venture into the lower reaches of the mountain.
Those lower caverns are narrower and wetter than the fictional version and would not have accommodated the action Phillips had planned for six people. The setting, in other words, had to bend somewhat to the story.
Death, loss and starting over
The emotional terrain of the novel was just as important to Phillips as its physical landscape.
“Ruby Falls” uses the familiar machinery of a murder mystery – a body, a confined group of suspects and the knowledge that someone among them is a killer – to examine less easily solved questions about grief, aging and what happens when the life a person expected is no longer available.
To explore those questions, Phillips deliberately made Ada a woman well into adulthood rather than a young hero just beginning to find her way in the world.
“I like the idea of a woman who doesn’t regret getting older, who actually likes who she’s become,” Phillips says. “I think that’s true of a lot of people. They wouldn’t choose to go back to 25.”
Age has given Ada competence and experience, but it’s also brought losses. By middle age, Phillips says, people have generally had to say goodbye – to people they loved, to possibilities they once imagined or to versions of life they once expected to live.
That allowed her to place genuine grief alongside the stylized death at the center of a traditional mystery.
“I thought it would be interesting to have someone dealing with death, loss and starting over while also facing a traditional murder mystery: Someone has died, and we’re trying to figure out who did it,” Phillips says.
Seven novels in
“Ruby Falls” is Phillips’ seventh novel in a career that has resisted easy categorization.
Her debut, “The Well and The Mine,” also reached back to the Great Depression, while “Come In and Cover Me” combined a contemporary love story with elements of a ghost story and historical fiction.
“Fierce Kingdom,” her 2017 novel about a mother and young son trapped in a zoo during a shooting, was widely regarded as a thriller, although Phillips says she initially thought of it simply as a fast-paced book about motherhood.
“I think of all my books as literary commercial fiction,” she says. “They’re character-driven, but they don’t fit neatly into one genre, and each one is a little different.”
That approach has earned Phillips considerable recognition. “Fierce Kingdom” was named one of the best books of 2017 by Publishers Weekly, NPR, Amazon and Kirkus Reviews, while “Ruby Falls” has attracted strong notices as well, with The New York Times, CrimeReads and Book Riot including it among their selections of notable new books this spring.
Booklist praised Phillips for combining the harsh realities of Depression-era life with an “electrifying, clock-is-ticking plot,” while New York Times bestselling author J.T. Ellison called the novel “clever, compelling, and utterly claustrophobic” and recommended it for Agatha Christie fans looking for a fresh take on the locked-room mystery.
Phillips’ own affection for Christie goes back much further. Growing up, she scoured secondhand bookstores for the mystery writer’s books and estimates she once had 70 or 80 Christie paperbacks on her shelves.
Yet Phillips doesn’t set out to write within a particular genre. Each novel, she says, tends to begin with a question she finds compelling, and the task then becomes finding the most interesting kind of story in which to explore it.
Putting fear in a box
Mystery provided the right form for “Ruby Falls.”
Phillips is intrigued by the enduring popularity of stories that turn something as frightening and uncontrollable as death into entertainment – even comfort.
“The cozy murder concept is so interesting to me,” she says. “Of all the things we could find comforting, it’s funny that we’ve chosen murder mysteries.”
But she sees something reassuring in the structure.
“I think there’s something comforting about being able to put death and fear in a box and know it’s going to follow certain rules and work out in the end,” she says. “That’s very different from real life, where we don’t have that kind of control.”
That combination of character and propulsion has become important to Phillips. She wants to explore what makes people behave the way they do, but she also wants to put them under enough pressure to reveal it.
A cave full of strangers and a murderer accomplishes both.
“I find it really interesting to put a group of strangers together in close quarters and watch the connections and animosities develop between them,” Phillips says.
For now, Phillips has committed one Chattanooga-area landmark to murder and mystery. Asked whether Rock City might be next, she laughs and proposes another Tennessee destination.
“I feel like Gatlinburg would be a good call,” Phillips says. “I feel like it’s ripe for a crazy murder. You have lumberjack shows, pancake houses – there’s so much there.”