Tamron Hall: Meet the Author & Journalist Behind As the Wicked Watch
Aug 23 2022
Tamron Hall's debut novel, "As The Wicked Watch," hit shelves back in October and was met with rave reviews from fans and critics alike. Hall's personal experience as an investigative journalist gives this thriller a backbone of reality as Jordan Manning attempts to solve the murder of Macey James, a 15-year-old Black child who the media ignored during her disappearance. Read "As the Wicked Watch" with the Friends & Fiction: Behind the Book club!
Who is Tamron Hall?
Tamron Hall is an award-winning broadcast journalist and television talk show host. Before starring in her own talk show, “Tamron Hall,” she hosted “Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall” and “Guns On Campus: Tamron Hall Investigates,” special which explored the dangerous cycle of gun violence at schools in the United States. Originally from Texas, Tamron began her career at KBXT in Bryan, Texas as a general assignment reporter. Eventually, she moved to Chicago and became a general assignment reporter, consumer reporter, and host of the three-hour “Fox News in the Morning” program at WFLD. She received the 2015 Edward R. Murrow Award for Reporting: Hard News in Network Television for her work on domestic violence. Tamron Hall's continued dedication to revealing dark secrets and silenced voices of the United States to the world has distinguished her in the broadcasting community.What are readers' favorite Tamron Hall quotes?
Fable makes it easy to annotate books, including ways to share and highlight your favorite quotes from a book. We've rounded up a few powerful quotes from "As the Wicked Watch.""Chicagoans and people all across this state have to deal with one inescapable fact, and that’s the cold. Sure, I’d heard people who claimed to love the change of seasons. But to a person from Austin, Texas, that sounded like a case of Stockholm syndrome." "I pried my shoes out of the mud that now encased them, and the sky burst like a thumped piñata.""People had to know the truth, as much of it as I think they can stand." "Missing Black children don’t typically receive the same amount of ink and airtime that missing White kids do.""Covering violent crime was humbling and terrifying. This beat has forced me to go to the dark end of the street my parents warned me about while I was growing up near a sketchy part of Southeast Austin."“There are friends and there are acquaintances,” my mom used to say. “A lot of folks don’t know which one they are. But you’d better know the difference.”“Bartlett was someone I used to hold in high esteem, for a man in his position. Now I realized he was a tool of the system, ineffective and weak, which was ironic for a man with so much power.”"In the Windy City, the curtain fell on fall’s finale, and winter’s opening act was ready to make its debut. This Texas transplant would be ready, too, on those unrelentingly frigid, snowy days to trade in my purple trench and cute bolero leather jacket, even my stilettos, for a pair of warm boots, earmuffs, and a shearling fur-lined coat. It was not what you were accustomed to that mattered, it was how well you could adapt to survive."What inspired As the Wicked Watch?
"As the Wicked Watch" is a fictionalized account of real issues Tamron Hall has encountered in her time as a journalist. The story follows journalist Jordan Manning, as she investigates the murder of several Black girls in Chicago. The story is inspired by real cases that Hall investigated in both Texas and Chicago. In an interview with Shondaland, Hall remembers that dark time in her life."One was in Texas, and one was in Chicago; both involved 11-year-old girls who were murdered. For me, writing this book and the process of it gave me an opportunity to deal with some of the sadness and some of the feelings of helplessness that reporters don’t often talk about. With those two cases, I didn’t have the opportunity to ever meet these young girls. In my mind, they were girls who could’ve been my friends or my loved ones. I had a deep personal connection to them without knowing them. Fast forward, I poured my heart into this book from being inspired by reporting on them."
Hall also used this book to highlight the misconception of Black reporters being biased when reporting on issues in Black communities."I’ve experienced that many times recently with Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. Especially with Trayvon Martin, it turned into a shocking and divisive conversation amongst people in cable news, where I was reporting at the time. "
How did Tamron Hall choose Jordan Manning’s name?
Tamron Hall decided to combine two famous athletes' names when creating her character, Jordan Manning. Can you guess who? Taking Michael Jordan and Peyton Manning's last names, Hall created a resilient, determined investigative journalist with the strength and endurance of some of the greatest athletes to come out of basketball and football.What is the plot of As the Wicked Watch?
When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network. Jordan is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Her signature? Arriving first on the scene—in impractical designer stilettos. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story—and giving a voice to the voiceless. From her time in Texas, she’s covered the vilest of human behaviors but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. Jordan is that rare breed of a journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as she can a newsroom—often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of Black women, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten. All until Masey James—the story that Jordan just can’t shake, despite all efforts. A 15-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot, Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration and anger that her job often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her work and her fraying personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires and that a missing Black child would so rarely get. There’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.Keep reading on Fable!
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