Earl Swift: On the Surprises and Learning Moments in Writing True-Crime
In this interview, author Earl Swift discusses the three decades between a crime and deciding to write about it in his new narrative nonfiction, Up on Cove Mountain.
Earl Swift is the author of the New York Times bestseller Chesapeake Requiem, which was named to ten best-of-the-year lists. His recent publication, Hell Put to Shame, was a finalist for the Edgar Award (Best Fact Crime) and the Virginia Literary Award. A former reporter for The Virginian-Pilot and a contributor to Outside and other publications, Swift lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Charlottesville. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Earl discusses the three decades between a crime and deciding to write about it in his new narrative nonfiction, Up on Cove Mountain, the importance of research on the quality of the writing, and more.
Name: Earl Swift
Literary agent: David Black
Book title: Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail
Publisher: Mariner (HarperCollins)
Release date: August 18, 2026
Genre/category: Narrative nonfiction ; memoir ; true crime
Previous titles: Hell Put to Shame; Across the Airless Wilds; Chesapeake Requiem; One Buck at a Time; Auto Biography; The Big Roads; The Tangierman’s Lament; Where They Lay; and Journey on the James
Elevator pitch for the book: While thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1990, I befriended two fellow hikers who were later murdered in a trailside lean-to—a rare episode of violence on the 2,200-mile footpath, and one that the killer never explained. Haunted by the crime for more than 30 years, I again hiked the trail in 2024, this time seeking insight into an unprovoked attack on two innocents who, it seems, did everything right.
What prompted you to write this book?
I never intended to write about my first hike or about the killings, but the story had other ideas—it kept picking away at my smug assumptions about destiny and luck, and whatever machinery governs the universe. Before the deaths of Molly LaRue and Geoff Hood, I was a typical suburban American who believed that violence usually arrived by invitation. I’d read a news report about an assault or homicide and rely on some quick mental calculus to distance myself from the victim: Glad I don’t have a drug problem. Good thing I don’t hang around crack houses. No way I’d be on that street at three in the morning.
This time, the math didn’t work. The victims had done nothing to invite their demise. On the contrary, they were the most capable outdoorsmen I met on the A.T. and were specifically trained to defuse tense situations. I couldn’t explain why fate had chosen them. The story defied logic.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I learned of the killings eight days after they happened. I was hungry to learn all I could about the case but had no intention of committing the story to paper—I simply needed to understand what had gone so terribly wrong at a campsite I’d slept in just a few nights before the victims did. It took 33 years in search of that insight, of chasing answers that eluded me, before I ultimately decided to hike the trail a second time and write about it.
That’s a ridiculously long gestation, but I have a history of letting a subject gel for a while before embarking on a book about it. I worked on my last, Hell Put to Shame, on and off for 16 years. Chesapeake Requiem took about the same amount of time. I invested nine years in Auto Biography, including three years embedded full-time in a junkyard in a North Carolina swamp.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I experience a slew of surprises and learning moments on every book I write. While reporting on this one, I was shocked at how much harder it was to backpack the A.T. in my middle-60s than it was in my early 30s—a revelation that should have been a no-brainer from the start, what with the trail’s elevation gains of 464,000 feet, equivalent to climbing Everest from sea level 16 times. The hike whipped my ass every waking moment for six months.
Beyond that, most of the surprises were pleasant ones. Example: My editor at Mariner, Peter Hubbard, got the backpacking bug while working on the story, and we closed a hole in the narrative by hiking together in Massachusetts. He even took the photo that became the book’s cover.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Not surprises, per se, but I certainly encountered some interesting challenges. I’ll often put off thinking about structure until I’m deep into my reporting; here, I had to figure out much of the book’s architecturebefore I started hiking, because it dictated where the story—and thus my walk—began and ended. And braiding the details of a double murder and its lingering aftereffects with a first-person adventure narrativeand finessing the tones of each so that the reader transitions smoothly and naturally between them, proved to be no easy feat.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Well, I’d like to think they’ll finish the story with a good sense of the amazing resource that is the Appalachian Trail, with some understanding of what it’s like to hike it for months on end, and with an appreciation for the culture that has blossomed around it over the past century. I hope, at the same time, that I’ve given them an intriguing true-crime story that defies most of the genre’s conventions. I wish for them to admire the victims as much as I do—and to grasp that the fact that they were embarked on a grand adventure, and relishing the trail and its culture, made their deaths all the more heartbreaking.
But more than anything, I hope the story provokes readers to meditate on their notions of luck and destiny. We hear all the time that “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t think you can leave this story confident there’s truth to that. Everything might have a cause, but a reason?
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I’d parrot what’s been said a million times before: Your writing is only as good as your research, so spend most of your time on that. (I’d estimate that I devote 80 percent of my time on a story to reporting and only 20 to actual writing, and I would prefer that breakdown to be even more one-sided.)
