There once was a man named Daniel Cornelius Duncan. His employer, the baker Rudolph Geilfuss, called him Daniel. His father, friends, and Ida Lampkin, his bride-to-be, called him Nealy.

Police officer W.H. Stanley called him a prisoner. Prosecutor John Peurifoy called him a murderer. The city of Charleston called him condemned. Newspaper reporter Hal Hinson, of the New York Tribune, called him a black messiah.

“Dead Weight” is a debut novel written by Batt Humphreys. A native of Georgia who grew up in New York and Canada, he was a TV reporter in Charleston before working as a senior producer for CBS News for 15 years. You’ve unknowingly heard news commentators speak his words. You saw the results of his behind-the-scenes work if you followed the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq on CBS.

Wanting a fresh perspective on life, Humphreys and his wife moved to a farm outside of Charleston a few years ago. They cultivated rice for a couple of seasons and now raise horses. A publisher friend brought him the true story of Nealy Duncan, a 23-year-old black man who was convicted of killing Jewish storeowner and tailor Max Lubelsky in 1910 in Charleston.

The ending of the story is already documented in court transcripts and newspaper reports. Duncan was the last man hanged by the state of South Carolina. But it’s in his new telling of the story that Humphreys has brought Nealy back to life.

The author has given flesh and blood to the facts. He brings Hal Hinson to Charleston and tells Nealy’s story through that reporter’s eyes and ears. Hinson hooks up with the irrepressible street urchin Mojo, who leads him among Charleston’s narrow lanes. He greets the city’s grande dame, Mrs. Vanderhorst, each day in the lobby of the Mills House. He comes under the spell of the singular entreprenuer Randy Dumas, a beautiful woman who keeps her secrets to herself and wields her power through knowing the secrets of others.

Like any good reporter or novelist, Humphreys has to get your attention and keep it. He does that with a concise yet descriptive writing style that keeps the reader engaged from one chapter to the next. Though one knows how the story will end, it’s Humphreys’ weaving of all the threads that makes the reader find himself wanting to have the same simple faith that Ida has that her Nealy will be freed.

I’m writing about a book that deals with murder and hanging in the pages of this paper’s Faith and Values section because “Dead Weight” is all about faith and values and the questions they raise and the redemption to which they lead. Was it Max Lubelsky’s making the decision against his Jewish faith to open his store on Saturdays that led to his death? What twists men to keep values that make them knowingly condemn an innocent man? Can a man’s faith in God be deep and strong enough to sustain him as he walks to his death and swings in the wind?

For those of you who’d rather hear your books than read them, “Dead Weight” will be told by Dick Estell on National Public Radio’s “Radio Reader” (90.1 FM in this area) each weekday from 8 to 8:30 a.m. beginning Friday, May 21.

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