Chiefs was published by W.W. Norton in 1981. It won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America and was adapted into a CBS television miniseries in 1983 (starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, and Billy Dee Washington). It remains, by critical consensus, Woods’s finest work — more ambitious, more carefully crafted, and more morally complex than anything in the Stone Barrington or Holly Barker series that would later make him one of America’s bestselling authors.
The novel spans four decades (1920s through 1960s) in Delano, Georgia — a fictional small town where young men have been disappearing without explanation. Three successive police chiefs discover parts of the truth: the first (a progressive farmer turned lawman in the 1920s) is murdered before he can act; the second (a racist good ol’ boy in the 1940s) is too corrupt to care; the third (a Black man appointed in the 1960s as a token of integration) faces both the mystery and the institutional racism that has protected the killer for forty years.
Woods’s achievement is structural: the multi-generational format allows him to examine how a small Southern town’s power dynamics — racial, economic, political — enable evil through silence. The serial killer is protected not because the town approves of murder but because exposing him would require confronting truths (about race, about sex, about the distribution of power) that the social structure cannot accommodate. Each chief who gets close to the truth is destroyed — by the killer, by the system, or by both.
Collecting Chiefs
First edition (W.W. Norton, New York, 1981): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $75–$200
- Without jacket: $8–$15
Woods’s literary debut and his most respected novel. The small first printing of a debut literary thriller makes fine copies less common than his later bestsellers.