Michael Wayne teaches history at University College, the University of Toronto. His first book, The Reshaping
of Plantation Society, won multiple prizes, including the Francis Butler Simkins Award of the Southern Historical
Association.
Review
"Michael Wayne has written a genuine old-South detective thriller-but this one happens to be true. Death
of an Overseer not only unravels the mystery of who murdered Duncan Skinner and why; it also reveals new insights
into the nature of slavery and race relations in the nineteenth-century South."
--James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
"Sex, race, slavery, and murder provide a rich mix in Wayne's deft deconstruction of the violent death of
a Mississippi overseer. This finely textured volume echoes elements of Faulkner, with its characters entangled
by passion, greed, and betrayal. Wayne not only skillfully excavates evidence from the nineteenth century, he also
takes us behind the scenes of a twentieth-century historical investigation, offering up doubts, deductions, and
imaginative speculation."
--Catherine Clinton, author of Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars
Oxford University Press Web Site, October, 2002
Summary
In May of 1857, the body of Duncan Skinner was found in a strip of woods along the edge of the plantation near
Natchez, Mississippi, where he worked as an overseer. Although a coroner's jury initially ruled his death to be
accidental, an investigation organized by planters from the community concluded that he had been murdered by three
slaves acting under instructions from John McCallin, an Irish carpenter.
Now, almost a century and a half later, Michael Wayne has reopened the case to ask whether the men involved
in the investigation arrived at the right verdict. Part essay on the art of historical detection, part seminar
on the history of slavery and the Old South, Death of an Overseer is, above all, a murder mystery-a murder mystery
that allows readers to sift through the surviving evidence themselves and come to their own conclusions about who
killed Duncan Skinner and why.
